3 Welcome: TaPRA @ 10

5 Getting to Royal Holloway and local taxis

6 Wifi

6 Eating and Drinking

10 Keynote Speakers

12 Performance

14 Practice Gallery

19 Schedule

43 Abstracts and Biography

203 Working Group Conveners

204 Maps and Rooms

1 2 Welcome: TaPRA @ 10

This short prologue is by way of a welcome to the 10th anniversary conference for TaPRA at Royal Holloway. It is fitting that we should be here at the end of our ninth year, as two of the founder members of the executive, David Bradby and Jacky Bratton spent the larger part of their academic careers in the department and Royal Holloway has played an important role more generally in the work of TaPRA over the years, with staff convening working groups and a large contingent at every conference.

TaPRA began at the University of Manchester in 2005. The organization, which had many different names in its first sixth months, came out of both a desire to celebrate our research and a frustration at the divisive nature of the (then) RAE. With a growing impatience at the lack of a national association for specifically UK-based theatre and performance research, the idea was to form an organization that could be membership based and conference lead, could be used by emerging scholars and more established scholars alike, as a place to try out their ideas. The original founders, David Bradby, Jacky Bratton, Maggie B.Gale, Viv Gardner and Baz Kershaw were joined by Maria Delgado, Brian Singleton, Kate Newey, Andy Lavender, Sophie Nield and Paul Allain – as the founding executive. We were charged with developing and maintaining the organization so it could work for researchers and be focused on their work. Other executive members in the early years came directly from founding and running working groups and a number went on to host conferences such as Roberta Mock in Plymouth. We have tried to have conferences across the UK and so members have been hosted in Manchester, London, Birmingham, Leeds, Cardiff, Plymouth, Kingston, Kent, Glasgow and now back near London again. Next year we go to our smallest venue at Worcester and we are still open to offers for 2016!

3 When we began as an organization we had around 90 members – we now have around 350 per annum. Some of our original members came for a few years, had a few years break and are now back with us. Others have come to every conference. We are at a transitional moment during this anniversary year. Maggie B. Gale is handing over the Chair to Gilli Bush-Bailey, lots of new members have joined the executive and established members are leaving. But more than this, looking around at the conference last year in Glasgow it was clear that TaPRA now hosts a whole new generation of researchers and the number of working groups and the areas they cover has grown beyond anything we could originally have imagined. This is a great thing, as is the fact that people come to TaPRA because they enjoy it – it is always collegial and convivial. With a number of collaborative publications having come out of TaPRA teams, and our David Bradby, Early Career Researcher and Postgraduate Essay prizes now well established, we have made a significant mark on the discipline. Our prizewinners have given brilliant keynote lectures for the last two years, and we are planning to make more of our early career prize winners in panels and key notes in future conferences. Our Postgraduate Essay prizewinner, and now runner up, get their essays edited by experienced senior editors and published in a major UK journal and the postgraduate working group has grown and grown over the past ten years. New researchers have a welcome and vital place in the organization. While it is the early career researchers who are having a particularly disheartening time in the employment market at the moment, the future work of TaPRA will not only focus on the challenges this presents for them but also look for ways to support mid-career researchers in the uncertain environment the sector is currently experiencing. We are a resilient, adaptable, innovative and vibrant sector and TaPRA looks forward to supporting and developing research for the next ten years and beyond.

Maggie B Gale (out going Chair), Gilli Bush-Bailey (incoming Chair)

4 Getting to Royal Holloway

The conference takes place at our Egham Campus, TW20 0EX.

By train Royal Holloway is about 40 minutes from central London. The College is connected by fast rail links to the rest of the country, with connections available at both London and Reading stations. There are four trains an hour from London Waterloo to Egham (40 minutes), Reading to Egham (40 minutes) and Woking to Egham (35 minutes: change at Weybridge). You can also reach Twickenham (17 minutes) and Richmond (20 minutes) as well as Clapham Junction on the Egham to London Waterloo train.

By Air Royal Holloway is about a 15 minute taxi ride from Heathrow airport. You are advised to pre-book local taxis as those at Heathrow are very expensive.

Taxis Local Egham taxi is Gemini Cars, who are very familiar with the area and the campus. Taxis usually available at the station, and on-line booking available. www.geminicars.co.uk 01784 471111

Parking There is parking available on campus. Please ask for a permit on registration.

On arrival, please come to the Boiler House theatre. Full directions can be found at: www.royalholloway.ac.uk/aboutus/locationmap/home.aspx

5 WiFi User name: tapra Password: rhtapra14 WiFi is available for all conference delegates.

Eating And Drinking

Crosslands is the conference bar, and is located in the South Quad of Founders (the back of Founders as you look at it from the entrance). It will be open on Wednesday and Thursday at 6pm until late.

Coffee, tea and lunch will be served in the Boiler House on each day of the conference, where the publishers are located. There is also Café Jules in the International Building, and the College Shop is located opposite the Windsor Building on the way to Founders. Apart from the conference dinner, there is no dinner provided on campus, but there are plenty of pubs and restaurants in Egham and Englefield Green.

The Conference Dinner will be served in the Picture Gallery in Founders North Quad, and comedian Robin Ince will perform in Crosslands after dinner. The conference dinner is a buffet, and is only available for people who have pre- booked. Everyone is welcome to come to Crosslands for Robin Ince at around 9.30 or 10pm.

6 Local Pubs (all serve pub food)

The Monkey’s Forehead Turn right out of the main gates of the campus Egham Hill and cross the road. Walk down the hill for a few (5 mins walk) minutes and you will see the pub on your left. Proximity to the drama department means this is a student haunt. www.monkeysforehead.co.uk

The Happy Man Turn right out of the main gates of the campus Harvest Road and cross the road. Harvest Road is on your left, (5 mins walk) and the pub is a couple of minutes’ walk up the road on the left.

The Beehive Turn right out of the main gates of the campus, Middle Hill cross the road and walk half way down the hill. (5 mins walk) Middle Hill is on the left, and the pub is a few minutes’ walk up the road on the right. beehiveegham.co.uk. Meet at The Beehive on Tuesday evening if you arrive early.

The Crown Turn right out of the main gates of the campus, High Street Egham cross the road and walk down the hill. Cross the (5-10 mins walk) roundabout, and the Crown is on the left past Loch Fyne Restaurant.

Restaurants Egham (5 mins walk)

Loch Fyne Located next to the main roundabout in Egham: (15 mins walk) turn right out of the main gates of the campus and seafood restaurant walk down Egham Hill to the roundabout. www.lochfyneseafoodandgrill.co.uk/locations/egham

7 Prezzo Located next to the main roundabout in Egham: (15 mins walk) turn right out of the main gates of the campus and Italian restaurant walk down Egham Hill to the roundabout. www.prezzorestaurants.co.uk/restaurant/egham

Egham High Street (10 minutes walk)

There are a number of restaurants (and pubs serving food) on Egham High Street: turn right out of the main gates of the campus, walk down the hill, across large roundabout and follow the road to Egham. Bear left for the high street at the mini-roundabout. Here are four as a start:

Bar 163 Open all day, and a favourite with the drama 163 High Street department staff for dinner. www.bar163.com

Villa Rosa 163 Italian restaurant, run by local family. 13-15 High Street www.villarosa.uk.com

Eat Thai sister restaurant central London won awards. 64 High Street www.eat-thai.net

Hugos Bar and locally sourced food. Open all day. 72 High Street www.hugosbarandgrill.co.uk

Englefield Green high street St Jude’s Road (5 mins walk)

Leave the campus by the main gate and cross the footbridge. Walk towards the traffic lights, and turn right at the lights. Follow St Jude’s Road for a few minutes, turning right at the mini roundabout, and you will find the shops and restaurants.

Mango Chutney Indian restaurant: mango-chutney.co.uk

Sopranos traditional Italian restaurant: sopranostakeaway.co.uk

Caspari Italian restaurant: www.casparirestaurant.co.uk

8 9 Keynote Speakers

David Bradby Memorial Lecture Jacky Bratton

Resetting the margins: careers in the history of nineteenth-century theatre

In The Making of the West End Stage I attempted a repositioning and revision of what was important about the earliest years of London’s West End theatreland, and who were its defining makers. In this lecture I shall offer an embellishment, a footnote to that argument, about the dynamic female dynasty of the queens of burlesque. It may be set within some dynastic reflections upon some theatre historians, as well as the histories, of the last two centuries.

Jacky Bratton is Emeritus Professor of Theatre and Cultural Studies at RHUL. She has published widely on 19th century performance history and its place in the evolution of 21st century practice in the performing arts, including two CUP books on British theatre history and historiography, New Readings in Theatre History (2001) and The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830-1870 (2011).

Jacky Bratton will be introduced by Kate Dorney

Shannon Jackson

Curating People: “Drama” and Other Time-Based Arts

This lecture explores contemporary and not-to-so contemporary practices of curating performance in spaces traditionally associated with visual art. Broadly speaking, there is nothing new about this practice; the field of ‘performance studies’ came into being, in part, to claim and to analyze experiments in what is variously called live art, performance art, body art, relational art, etc. Arguably, however, there is a different kind of conventionality to a current scene of experiment as curators find themselves installing ‘dance’ and sometimes even ‘theater’ inside the experience-friendly gallery of the museum. After taking stock of some

10 assumptions behind static, durational, and experiential art traditions, this lecture examines a network of artists for whom the presumably anachronistic term ‘drama’ is particularly productive. Juxtaposing classic definitions of ‘drama’ and ‘the dramatic’ with more recent definitions of ‘time-based art,’ I consider how artists such as Gerard Byrne, Rich Maxwell, and David Levine position ‘drama’ as a resource in contemporary artworld experiments.

Shannon Jackson is the Richard and Rhoda Professor of Rhetoric and Performance Studies at UC-Berkeley where she is also Director of the Arts Research Center. Her publications include Lines of Activity (2000), Professing Performance (2004), and Social Works (2011) as well as dozens of essays in journals, collections, and catalogues; her new book, The Builders Association, is in production with M.I.T. Press. Most recently, she was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foun- dation for 2014/2015.

Shannon Jackson will be introduced by Emma Cox

Rufus Norris: In Conversation with Dan Rebellato

Rufus Norris came to prominence with his production of Afore Night Come at the Young Vic in 2001, for which he won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. In Spring 2015 he will take over as Artistic Director of the National Theatre, for whom he’s directed The Amen Corner, Table, London Road, Death and the King’s Horseman, and Market Boy. He is just starting work on Behind the Beautiful Forevers adapted by David Hare from the book by Katherine Boo, which will open at the Olivier Theatre in November. Other directing work includes The Country Girl, Cabaret (both West End and tour), Les Liasons Dangereuses (Broadway), Festen (Almeida, West End, tour and Broadway), Blood Wedding (Almeida), Feast, Vernon God Little, Tintin, Sleeping Beauty, Peribanez (Young Vic), Under the Blue Sky, About the Boy, Clubbed Out (Royal Court), Small Change (Sheffield Crucible),Dirty Butterfly (Soho Theatre), My Dad’s Cornershop (Birmingham Rep), Mish Alla Ruman (Al Kasaba Theatre, Pakistan). He has directed music theatre – including Tall Stories (Battersea Arts Centre and Vienna Festival) and Sea Tongue (The Shout), opera - Dr Dee (MFI and ENO), Don Giovanni (ENO) - and film – King Bastard and Broken. He is currently developing the screen adaptation of London Road for Cuba Pictures and BBC Films.

11 Photo: Tania El Khoury. The Future Show was developed with a grant from Arts Council England and with support-in-kind from BAC, Amhurst Republic and MAKE in Ireland.

12 The Future Show by Deborah Pearson

“As soon as I finish speaking you will clap. Even those of you who were a bit bored will clap because it’s a comfortable way to signal an ending.”

The Future Show is both a performance and an on-going project. It is a piece that tells the story of my future, starting from the end of the performance and going until the end of my life, that is consistently re-written to be both site and time specific. It is a Sisyphean task of a show, examining the mundane, the uncertain, and the fragility of our futures.

“A testament to Pearson’s astonishing skill as a writer.” (Andrew Haydon for Whatsonstage) *****

“A beautiful, sad show about our mayfly lives.” (@lyngardner)

Running time approximately Caryl Churchill Theatre 50 minutes. 7pm Wednesday 3rd September

13 Practice Gallery exhibition in the dance studio curated by Nik Wakefield

The Practice Gallery is a mobile set of units designed to display materials of interdisciplinary practice as research. It is twelve pieces of sculpted furniture designed in collaboration between the Practice-based research program at Royal Holloway and Unit 14 at Bartlett School of Architecture. It is a new initiative supported by the Creativity interdisciplinary research theme at Royal Holloway University of London. At TaPRA, the Practice Gallery will display the work of nine artist scholars and be open during all breaks in the dance studio across the courtyard from the Boilerhouse. Displayed research includes -

Allan Taylor ‘Queering the Countryside’, which investigates the performance intervention and the still image. Taylor is currently undertaking a PhD on the intersections of performance and photography at Falmouth University.

Ben Fletcher-Watson ‘White’ is the first mobile app inspired by a children’s theatre production. Fletcher-Watson is in the final year of a PhD in Drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the University of St Andrews, supported

14 by an ESRC CASE Studentship. His research examines contemporary Scottish practice in Theatre for Early Years.

Deborah Leveroy ‘Visual representations of Dyslexia & Acting’ The exhibit is a visual and audio representation of my PhD research concerning dyslexia and acting practice. The process documents are visual representations created by the actor-participants in workshops, in response to the prompt words ‘acting’ and ‘dyslexia’; and supplemented with workshop audio recordings. Leveroy’s PhD thesis: ‘Enabling Performance: Dyslexia and Acting Practice’ explores the lived experience of dyslexia in the context of acting practice. She is an assistant lecturer at the University of Kent, and a dyslexia coach/trainer for Randstad Student Support, the Actors Centre and Actors Guild.

Hannah Gravestock ‘Dance with me’. As ice skates we are the co-authors of a performance and as additional performing bodies that partner the skater, we embody and reveal the memories of this physical dialogue in and on our skin. We invite you to watch us practice, play and de-stablise our owner, to feel our flexibility and our strength and to meet our fellow creative players. Gravestock recently completed her PhD at the University of the Arts London and her work presented here is Hannah’s first performance as research project. It represents the first stage in a collaborative performance project that will explore the choreographic potential of scenography.

Irene Liverani ‘Italians_2001’ is a poly-vocal account on the events of 2001 Genova G8 and their impact on a group of teenagers of that time. Liverani has undertaken a practice-led PhD at the Drama, Theatre and Perfor- mance Department of University of Roehampton. For Italians_2001 she collaborates with musician Alessio Mezzarobba.

15 Jane Lloyd ‘A 10 DAY WALK IN A CARE HOME 2014’ is a book that compares the sensory, spatial and aesthetic experience of walking outdoors in the landscape to that of walking indoors in a care home. Lloyd is a second year PhD student at Royal Holloway, Uni- versity of London, sponsored by Age Exchange Theatre Trust. Her practice-based PhD explores the relevance of reminiscence and inter-disciplinary arts practices (theatre, music, fine art and dance) to older people with dementia living in care homes.

Jessica Worden ‘Echo/plasm’ (2013), an artist’s book, explores breathlessness through a performance writing practice. Within the pages of this book, the text slowly dissipates under a whiteness and a sense of breathlessness ensues. Worden is a Dutch/American artist living and working in London, UK. She is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Brunel University where she is looking at different ways that breathlessness can be performed on the page.

Megan Garrett-Jones ‘Granules’ - In exploring a state of home-looseness, we may think of particles adrift, or momentarily suspended. Invoking with the law of hospitality, the artist offers an edible geography. Garrett-Jones is a performance maker and writer, expatriate Australian and repatriated Briton. She recently completed a Research Masters in Performance and Creative Research at the University of Roehampton.

Pema Clark ‘At Sea: 1980-2010’ is a performance instruction manual on how to liberate yourself from the past. It is based on a live performance. Clark’s practice- based PhD at the University of East Anglia is Self and No Self: Buddhist Influences in Contemporary Performance.

16 Rosanna Irvine ‘Perception Frames: written pieces’ is a collection of choreographic scores for practice and performance in dance and other media. The scores are informed by a philosophical concern towards unfounded modes of thinking in practice. Irvine is an inter- disciplinary choreographer and research artist. She is presently completing an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award with Middlesex University and Dance 4.

The Practice Gallery wants you. If you are interested in showing work or using it for an exhibition or event contact Nik Wakefield on [email protected]

17 18 Schedule

Wednesday 3rd September

Time Programme Venue

10am –1pm Registration Boiler House

12am – 1pm Lunch in Boiler House Boiler House

12-12.45pm Introductory Postgraduate Meeting Boiler Room An open forum for new, returning postgraduates and early career researchers to connect with their peers, to informally discuss shared interests and to find out a bit more about TaPRA and this year’s conference. Grab lunch in the Boiler House and take it to the Boiler Room next door.

1pm-1.20pm Conference Welcome and Research Boiler Room Prize Presentations Lecture Theatre

rd th th 3 4 5 19 1.30 – 3.30pm Working Groups Session 1

Applied & Social Dave Calvert: Heroism as the aesthetic Green Room Theatre dimension of solidarity.

Katie Beswick: ‘X’ – Fantasy and Heroism in the National Youth Theatre’sThe Block

Stephen Greer: The problem with (queer) martyrs

Maja Milatovic-Ovadia: Hero or Villain? The story of a clean t-shirt.

20th-21st Century Dick McCaw and Mark Evans Studio 1 Performer Training in discussion - on Dick McCaw’s ‘Documenting Practice’ (Interview/discussion)

Trevor Rawlins: Actor training in the digital age – reflections on practice

Marisa Zanotti: Demonstration and paper on her App developed for teaching screendance.

Directing and Adam Ledger: The director and IN243 Dramaturgy adaptation: radical revisioning in the work of Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Theme: Auteurs Amsterdam

Melissa Poll: Auteur-ing Adaptation: Robert Lepage Re-‘writes’ The Nightingale

Mark Robson: Who’s there?: Hospitality, Originality, Adaptation

rd th th 20 3 4 5 Documenting James Burrows: Lines of Flight: Seminar Performance Exploring the Florilegium – A Room Memetic application for the curation of Digital/Live Performance Networks

Karen Quigley: Documented struggles: site specific practice in Chester city centre

Joseph Dunne: Reimagining the future cityscape: how the digital archive can shatter the Olympic Dream

Georgina Guy: Making Visible: Paul Klee and the Museum without Dust

Ollie Evans: What can’t be coded can be decorded: Performing James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake through Textual Genetics

Performance and Andy Lavender: Virtually Here RRA New Technologies (but still not quite yet): towards Internet Theatre

Annet Dekker: The ‘act’ of net art: Extending the performative act by looking at its circular behaviour

Nathan Walker: Action Score Generator: Permutation, Performance and Writing Machines

Irene Liverani: The Participatory Collection-Installation: introducing an entity in performance and installation art

Giuliana Fenech: Ecologies of Play: Emergent Participation and Performance

rd th th 3 4 5 21 Performance Laura Bissell and David Overend: Studio 2 and the Body Rhythmic Routes: Developing a nomadic physical practice for the daily commute

Vicky Hunter: Do You Come Here Often? Mapping Urban Space through Embodied Encounters

Liam Jarvis: Body Transfer Illusions in Analogue’s Transports

Royona Mitra: Auto-ethnography, ‘inexclusion’ and Akram Khan’s Loose in Flight (1999)

Performance, Liz Tomlin: I am not We: Ideological Caryl Identity and assumptions of ‘community’ in Churchill Community contemporary audience misrecognition Theatre

Marissia Fragkou: A glimpse into some other world’: Stan’s Cafe’s (class) politics

Trish Reid: Caledonian Dreaming: The Performance of a Different Scotland in Keiran Hurley’s Rantin

Popular Marco Valleriani: Harlequin: Tradition IN245 Performance and Innovation

Louise Peacock: Pulcinella and Punch: Players and Puppets

Scenography Hannah Gravestock: A performance- RRB led investigation into using costume as a creative partner

rd th th 22 3 4 5 Nicholas Arnold: The Ghost is (already) in the Machine– the costume as its own history

Sarah Winter: Tracing the Performed Ghost: creating an environment that encourages memory re-call and emotional engagement in participants

Bridget Keehan: Evocations of Past Present and Future in Day to Go, a site specific show

Theatre History and Philip Watkinson: Spacing the IN244 Historiography Past, Affecting the Future: Site Specific Performance and Affective Materialism

Matthew Reason: Walking and Biography: The Resurrection of Joyce Reason

Romany Reagan: Grief Symbolisation, Multiple Becomings and Anachronistic Space: the Cemetery as a Unique Ground for a Walking Practice

Theatre, Goran Petrovic: Which Performance Boiler Performance and Philosophy? A Quasi-Transcendental Room Philosophy Politico-Philosophical Perspective on (Dance) Performances - Implications Theme: performance for Performativity and Temporality. philosophy James Corby: Realising Performance Philosophy: Problems and Possibilities

Kelina Gotman: Anaesthesis: Falls, Fatigue, Pain and the Limits of Dance

rd th th 3 4 5 23 3.30 – 4.00pm Tea and coffee Boiler House

4.00 – 5.00pm Shannon Jackson Boiler Room Keynote Address Lecture Theatre

5.00 – 6.00pm 10th Anniversary Drinks Reception Boiler House

5.00pm Crosslands Bar opens Founders onwards 7.00 – 8.00pm Performance: Deborah Pearson, Caryl The Future Show Churchill Theatre

rd th th 24 3 4 5 Thursday 4th September

Time Programme Venue

9.00 – 9.30am Registration Boiler House

9.30 - 11am Working Groups Session 2

Applied & Social Kat Low / Sue Mayo: Never Flying Green Room Theatre Solo: The Collaborative, Ordinary Heroes

Kay Hepplewhite: Not holding out for an action hero rides again

Alison Reeves: Heroism and Adventurism: Can Applied Theatre Practices give participants the experience of being the heroes and heroines of their own stories?

Lisa Woynarski: Ecological Sentinels: Indigenous heroes or colonial cliché?

20th-21st Century Tom Cantrell and Christopher Hogg: Studio 1 Performer Training From Drama School to Albert Square: Training and the Camera on a Modern British Soap

rd th th 3 4 5 25 Jon Burtt: Video feedback and the teaching of physical expertise

Hannu Tuisku: The Stranger by Baudelaire and all the actor needs, in two minutes (provocation)

Michael Morgan: Screen Intimacy: Training Actors to be Intimate for/ to/ with the Camera

Directing and Catherine Love: By the Book: IN243 Dramaturgy Adaptation, Work and Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz Theme: Postmodern Adaptations of Ben Fowler: Katie Mitchell’s Modernist Twists theatricalisation of the novel: Innovating form, excavating subjectivity

Rebecca Benzie: Adapting the past: Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s reconstruction of the Suffragette woman for a twenty-first century audience

Documenting Sophie Johns: Collector, object, RRA Performance researcher: Rematerialising interaction with physical artefacts in The Bristol University Theatre Collection

Pema Clark: Performing Sand: A Case for the Abandonment of Video Documentation in Buddhist Inspired Live Art

Joanna Linsley: Documenting Voice, Reproducing Authenticity

Marc Silberschatz: Whose research is it anyway? Challenges in documenting practice-led research in theatre directing

rd th th 26 3 4 5 Performance and Rosie Klich: Amplifying Perception: MX034 NewTechnologies The In and Out-puts of Headphone Theatre

Maria Oshodi, Adam Spiers and Janet van der Linden: Exploring haptics for novel sensory dramatic experiences: New Perspectives on accessibility in performance

Beverley Hood: Eidolon – Phantasm and fidelity in the Theatre

Kerry Francksen: Fluid exchanges: Digital energies

Performance Jem Kelly: Touched By Your Presence Studio 2 and the Body - incarnations and virtualities in Station House Opera’s telematic performances, Nowhere (2013) and Dissolved (2014)

Jenny Lawson: Genderless Space? Bodies out of Place: Performing Zombie and other figures of female monstrosity

Mary Richards: “Bring and Do Nothing”: Abramović’s 512 Hours (2014) in the context of Rhythm 0 (1974)

Performance, Matt Hargrave: Getting Both Things Caryl Identity and Right: Revisiting Stuart Hall and the Churchill Community politics of representation in relation to Theatre the Unlimited Festival

Eleanor Massie: Amateur-Professional Mimicry and Memories of Blackface

rd th th 3 4 5 27 Jo Ronan: In Conversation with Fatima Rateb

Popular Jon Davison: Clown History Today IN245 Performance Maggie Irving: Inspired by Dadaist Baroness Elsa: Clown Sedusa paves new pathways for clowning

Barnaby King: “Que se vaya el payaso”: Routines of Vulgarity in Colombian Circus Clowning

Scenography Harriet Richmond: The Motley RRB Theatre Design Course: Documenting theatre design pedagogy

Sophie Jump: The Invisible Designer: Jocelyn Herbert’s designs for The Kitchen (1958 &1961)

Francesca Peschiar: Preserving the Process: Scenography and Visual Identity in Regional Theatre

Andy Smith: Chekhov Home Movies

Theatre History and Sam Haddow: “Ladies and Gentlemen IN244 Historiography You Don’t Belong Here”: Blood and Chocolate’s Dramatic Rebuttal to our new ‘Patriotic’ WW1

Pauline Hadaway: Common Voices – Building the Future from the Past?

Anwen Jones and Rowan O’Neill: Living Maps of Wales: Place, Space and Performance in the Work of Owen Rhoscomyl and Cliff McLucas

rd th th 28 3 4 5 Theatre, Mischa Twitchin: What chance Boiler Room Performance and failure? (Or: On failure: work in Philosophy progress.)

Theme: failure Nik Wakefield: On How Failure and performance Requires Success - Nik Wakefield

Neil MacDonald: Failed Sacrifice and Mutual Exposure: Ron Athey and Georges Bataille

11 – 11.30am Tea and coffee Boiler House

11.30 – 1pm Panel Sessions 1

Directing and Adrian Curtin: The Neo-Futurists(’) IN243 Dramaturgy Take on Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude

Pedro de Senna: From text to dance- theatre: a version of Carthage/ Cartagena

Silvija Jestrovich: Re-writing the Author: Chekov as Intertextual Protagonist

Documenting Wikimedia workshop, led by Toni PC IN005 Performance Sant (max 25 people) The workshop will provide a practical introduction in writing, editing and contributing to the Wikipedia project of sharing knowledge. This is the third in a series of workshops run by Wikimedia UK in partnership with TaPRA with the aim of turn TaPRAns into Wikpedians.

rd th th 3 4 5 29 Details of the last event are here: https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/ TaPRA_Wikipedia_Workshop_ March_2014

Performance Broderick Chow: The Self-Made Man: Boiler Room and the Body fitness and the body as the site of masculine self-fashioning

Patrick Duggan: Dis-eased: performing the politics and power of dirty and dying bodies

Sarah Gorman: Feminist Disavowal or Return to Immanence? The Problem of Post-Postructuralism and the Naked Female Form

Performance, Adam Alston: The Politics of Paradise: Caryl Identity and The Living Theatre, the New Left and Churchill Community the New Spirit of Capitalism Theatre

Hannah Cummings: At Stake: Fun, Games and Democracy in ‘Fight Night’ and ‘The Great Spavaldos’

Philip Hager: The truth must be spoken to stop this bullshit

Gareth White: Participatory theatre and democracy effects

Theatre History and Helen Brooks: ‘It was just like that out Studio 2 Historiography there’ Wartime Representations of the Trenches

Joanna Robinson: Putting Performance back into Place: The Malt Cross Music Hall Project

rd th th 30 3 4 5 Rachel Hann: The Architecture of V. E. Meyerhold

1.00 – 2.00pm Lunch Boiler House

Katharine 1.00 – 2.00pm TaPRA Executive Meeting Worth (staff common room)

Postgraduate Meeting Worlds Collide: combining Boiler Room session research with your existing practice

This PG session explores the academy’s impact on practice. Whether performer, archivist, playwright, choreographer, practitioner, curator, director or designer, many researchers bring an existing practice with them when they (re)enter the academy. The maintenance and development of personal practice during a PhD can be challenging, even in practice-based, practice-led or practice-as-research contexts. How do we respond creatively to academic environments? How can differing modes of inquiry be brought together? How can research be imbricated within ongoing practice, to the benefit of both? What routes to employment are open to the researcher-artist?

Please feel free to bring your lunch into this session.

2.00 – 3.00pm Rufus Norris: Boiler Room In Conversation

3.00 – 4.30pm Working Group Session 3

rd th th 3 4 5 31 Applied & Sally Mackey and Sarah Cole: Green Room Social Theatre A Home fit for Heroes? Performing carer landscapes

Susan Haedicke: Breaking a Legacy of Hatred: Friches Théâtre Urbain’s Lieu Commun

Matt Jennings: ‘Crows on the Wire’: Tragic Heroes, Conflict Transformation and Policing in Northern Ireland

20th-21st Century Jessica Beck: Emotional connection Studio 1 Performer Training and consistency for film acting: A short introduction to Alba Emoting (workshop)

Christina Kapadocha: Actor training and the camera: the documentation of a somatic approach to acting

Directing and Jozefina Komparaly: Adaptation IN243 Dramaturgy as Radical Re-telling: Multiplicity, Spectatorship, Experience Theme: Adapting Mythic Women Sarah Passfield: Re-Bourne: a classical princess awakes in a 21st century gothic fairytale Matthew Bourne’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’; a dance-theatre triumph!

Benjamin Poore: Pygmalion and Adaptation: A Matter of Life and Death

Documenting Laura Molloy: Documentation is just RRA Performance the beginning: digital curation practice in the UK performing arts community’

rd th th 32 3 4 5 Allan Taylor: The performative photograph: how the still image ‘does’

Yvonne Schmidt: Free Republic Hora

Pia Elisabeth Strickler: Actor Training as an Example of Polycultural Switzerland

Performance and Johannes Birringer: Audible MX034 New Technologies Choreographies: Movement Technologies and Retrogardism

Daniël Ploeger: Towards Abject Digital Performance: Engaging the politics of electronic waste

Mari Thynne: Interactive Theatre: Reconfiguring the value space

Elena Marchevschka: Can You See Us Now? (The politics of self-organised choir Raspeani Skopjani and their social media presence)

Performance Clair Hampton: (De)Constructing Studio 2 and the Body the Female in Cyberspace.

Traci Kelly: To provoke tears: performing histories of induced weeping

Adelina Ong: Can Bodies Resist Panoptic Control Through Parkour- inspired Applied Theatre Practice?

Victor Ramirez Ladron De Guevara: Liquid Boundaries: Cartesian Dualism, Abjection and Aesthetics of the Performer’s Sweat

rd th th 3 4 5 33 Performance, Kerrie Schaefer: Islands of Milwaukee: Caryl Identity and a critical analysis of performance in Churchill Community a structurally segregated city Theatre

Nicky Hatton: Personal taste and identity in the care home ‘community’: implications for theatre practice

Natalie Lee: Performing Home: Creating new representations of social housing through performance

Popular Adam Ainsworth: The Empire IN244 Performance and Theatre, Kingston upon Thames: Theatre History a significant urban place in existential and Historiography suburban place Shared Panel Kate Newey: Behind the Scenes: Tradition and Liminality in Victorian Pantomime

Kate Holmes: Placing the Circus: how interwar circus spaces affected reception of female aerialists

Scenography Pollack and Nicholson: RAPTURE RRB a work in progress PechaKucha

Nick Hunt What’s the Small Idea? A miniature art gallery Workshop / activity (can be viewed by others during Tea break)

Theatre, Emma Cox: Grievable Dead: Boiler Room Performance and Museums, Repatriation and Disturbing Philosophy Remains

rd th th 34 3 4 5 Theme: theatre, Deborah Newton: Collapsing Binaries performance and and Shifting Perspectives: Towards an participation Emerging Ontology of Performance

Maia Mackney: Radical rhythms: Identity and temporality in the devising process and performance of Unleashed at Barbican Centre in 2012

4.30 – 5.00pm Tea and coffee Boiler House

5.00 – 6.00pm Jacky Bratton Boiler Room The David Bradby Memorial Lecture

6.00 – 7.00pm Theatre and Science meeting Boiler Room

6.00 – 7.00pm Practice Gallery: Private View (by invitation)

6.00 pm Crosslands Bar open Founders onwards

7.00-7.30pm Conference Dinner and Robin Ince Picture Gallery/ Crosslands

rd th th 3 4 5 35 Friday 5th September

Time Programme Venue

9.00 – 10.00am WG Convenors Meeting Caryl Churchill Theatre 10.00 – 11.30am Panel Sessions 2

Performance and Sita Popat: Questions Concerning Caryl New Technologies Movement and Technology Churchill Theatre N.B. Business Meeting Jennifer Parker-Starbuck: Cyborg to take place Returns: Always-Already Subject 13.30-13.50pm Technologies (in RRA) Louise LePage: Dramatic Stagings of Robots and Humans in Living Rooms: A Study of Posthumanist Forms

Popular Claire Warden: Tombstones and text: Studio 2 Performance the presence and absence of audible language in professional wrestling

James McLaughlin: The Censor Without, The Censor Within: The Resistance of Johnstone’s Improv to the Social and Political Pressures of 1950s Britain

rd th th 36 3 4 5 Simon Sladen: Camp as Christmas? Exploring Effeminacy in Modern British Pantomime

Theatre, Swen Steinhauser: Rehearsing the Boiler Room Performance and future to come - contextual openings Philosophy in Benjamin, Derrida and Every house has a door Theme: testimony and ethics Amanda Stuart Fisher: The Scene of Witnessing: The ‘Haunting’ of David Oluwale

Paul Johnson: Bioethics, performance, and the failure of imagination

Performance P. Solomon Lennox: The Permeability Studio 1 and the Body of Place: My body in the field (one-to-one performative event)

Directing and Business Meeting: Plans for the future. IN243 Dramaturgy If possible, please would all speakers attend this session.

11.30 – 12.00 noon Tea and coffee Boiler House

Caryl 12.00 – 1.00pm Tapra AGM Churchill Theatre

1.00 – 2.00pm Lunch Boiler House

2.00 – 3.30pm Working Groups Session 4 + Business meeting

Applied & Social Matt Smith: False Idols: The Applied Green Room Theatre Puppeteer as Meek Hero.

rd th th 3 4 5 37 Cath Heinemeyer: Storytelling and/or drama with teenagers: who provides the raw material for cultural democracy?

20th-21st Century Libby Worth: Dance as training for Studio 2 Performer Training film acting: with case study Robert Helpmann in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Jay Paul Skelton: How Mary Overlie and Anne Bogart’s ‘Viewpoints’ might support and enhance Stanislavsky’s technique of active analysis

Janine Cowell: Training for musical theatre

Documenting Jess Olivieri: Sex, Lies and Video RRA Performance Tapes: Performance Art and the Market

Performance and Aristita I. Albacan: Flash mobs as MX034 New Technologies Performance: the re-emergence of creative communities N.B. Business Meeting 13.30-13.50, just prior Jo Scott: Making: New – encounters to this WG session through new technology in performance

Maria Chatzichristodoulou: Live Art in Network Cultures

Julian Maynard Smith, Rob White and David McLellan: Telematically Reciprocating Motorised Doors

Eirini Nedelkopoulou: Participate or Else: Re-considering Audience Participation in Interactive Performance

rd th th 38 3 4 5 Martin Blain: The Good, The God, and The Guillotine: Collaboration, Technology, Liveness

Performance Juliano Coelho de Souza Ladeira: Studio 1 and the Body Cosmology and body: the relationship between human body and Balinese N.B. Business cosmic cartography. Meeting to be held at 13.15 Margaret Ames: The place of the in Studio 1 performer with learning disabilities: Thoughts on presence, virtuosity and social constructions of the (dis)abled artist

Jyoti Argade: Dance: Urban Practice

Prathana Purkayastha: Devi, the Divine Dancer, Goes to Kolkata

Jayne Lloyd: The aesthetic, sensory and social qualities of reminiscence arts practice with people with dementia who live in care homes

Kate Marsh: Displacing the disabled dancer in performance

Lise Uytterhoeven: Intersections between home, place and identity in La Zon-Mai by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Gilles Delmas

Performance, Elizabeth Bennett: Souterrain: Caryl Identity and A journey underground in the Sussex Churchill Community landscape Theatre

Sarah Mullan: Bread and Circuses: the politics of claiming identity

rd th th 3 4 5 39 Emma Miles: Small rebellions: Exploring age related norms in Polka Theatre’sGorilla

Popular Caroline Astell-Burt: The Pressing IN245 Performance of Flesh - Training for the Puppeteer today

Sophie Quirk: Manipulation and the Dark Arts in Stand-up Comedy and Stage Magic

Theatre History and Dan Rebellato: Whatever happened to IN244 Historiography Gay Naturalism

Veronica Isaac: My Own House, Bought with My Own Money

Scenography Greer Crawley: The sectional RRB elevation as a scenographic structure

Aoife Monks: Craft: A Manifesto

Theatre, Cormac Power: The Spectator as Boiler Performance and Poacher: Revising Passive vs Active Room Philosophy Spectatorship

Theme: politics and Rachel Cockburn: The precarious engagement producer and the failure of resistance!

Lizeta Makka: Praxis and creativity: The project of autonomy and the collective event

3.30-4.00pm Conference Closes

rd th th 40 3 4 5 41 42 Abstracts and Biographies Working Group Presenters

44 Applied and Social Theatre

58 20th-21st Century Performer Training

69 Directing and Dramaturgy

80 Documenting Performance

93 Performance and New Technologies

117 Performance and the Body

140 Performance, Identity and Community

155 Popular Performance

166 Scenography

176 Theatre History and Historiography

189 Theatre, Performance and Philosophy

43 Applied and Social Theatre Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Dave Calvert Heroism as the aesthetic dimension of solidarity (20 minute paper)

In the founding myth of Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal is amongst a troupe of frightened agitprop actors who refuse to participate in the insurrection that they themselves have incited. Turning away from didactic models and towards theatrical forms grounded in debate, Boal adopts a motto from Che Guevara: Solidarity means running the same risks. At first sight, Boal’s choice here appears anti-heroic, as fear and panic prevents him from taking both risks and action. Guevara’s carefully balanced phrase, however, suggests that meaningful risk is always underpinned by solidarity. This paper proposes that such solidarity is the a priori condition of heroism.

This elemental condition suggests that care – as a variant form of solidarity – can also be understood as heroic, most notably in cases of ‘unsung heroes’ inflected by gender politics. The triangulation of solidarity, care and risk is familiar to applied theatre practice, and I argue consequently that a consideration of heroism invites us to reflect on the mechanics of solidarity within applied theatre. The paper further considers heroism to be necessarily performative, in that it is not an inherent property of action but is conferred as a consequence of spectatorship. From this perspective, heroism is not merely a public act of solidarity, but is solidarity in its aesthetic form.

To investigate this idea, the paper will consider ‘heroic’ figures from both fictional and non-fictional arenas, and from within and without the field of applied and social theatre.

Dave Calvert is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Huddersfield. His research interests focus on theatre and performance practices involving learning disabled adults, and he has published on artists such as Heavy Load, Susan Boyle and Mind the Gap. He also investigates the works of troupes in popular entertainment, notably the history of the British pierrot form and the Rat Pack.

44 Katie Beswick ‘X’ – Fantasy and Heroism in the National Youth Theatre’sThe Block (20 Minute paper)

I know people that live on estates, and a lot of people do need someone to come and, in a way, save them from themselves – you know what I mean? [...] Like even friends [and] myself - I know my friends that sell [drugs], and they’re in massive debt, and then friends that are in prison. They just need - like, if only they had someone there to take them away. (Youth participant, The Block) In 2010, as part of the National Youth Theatre’s social inclusion educational outreach programme ‘Playing Up 2’, young people identified as ‘NEETS’ (Not in Education, Employment or Training) performed a new-writing play called The Block, by first time playwright Tarkan Cetinkaya. This play is set on an unnamed London council estate, and follows the intersecting lives of ten estate denizens, brought together by the central character, Barry/Baz, and his struggle with an unspecified personality disorder.

Many of the young people involved in the project lived or had lived on estates, and many faced ongoing social and economic problems that had interfered with their ability to find employment.

In the final scene of the play, which up until this point follows the conventions of social realism, a mysterious character named ‘X’ is revealed to be a superhero. He turns back time and changes the course of events in the play, saving a young woman’s life and preventing her brother from embarking on a lifetime of punishment, guilt and regret.

This paper problematises the character of ‘X’, exploring how the relationship between realism and fantasy, in this performance, worked to suggest that social change hinges upon intervention from an outside ‘hero’. I ask what the implications of this message might be for participants and audience members and explore how the narrative of The Block intersects with the National Youth Theatre’s wider social inclusion policy.

Katie Beswick is a lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She recently completed her PhD ‘Council Estates in Performance: Performance Practice and the Production of Space’, at the University of Leeds. She is currently writing about the National Youth Theatre’s outreach training programmes, and about race and racial difference in representations of South East London.

45 Stephen Greer The problem with (queer) martyrs (20 minute paper)

This paper considers the cultural status of queer heroes and martyrs, and their role in activist-oriented performance: how one kind of exceptional subject can seem to demand and produce another, and the ways in which the figure of the ‘good homosexual’ may be inseparable from the strategies of formal recognition which have come to dominate mainstream LGBT politics. It offers a reflection on an ongoing research project centred on the question of queer exceptionalism in performance – the dramaturgy of subjects marked out from cultural norms of different kinds, and yet also made available as spaces of collective identification. As such, this paper also responds to the ways in which a queer attentiveness to exceptional difference may share conceptual territory with the demand for difference within neo-liberal structures of value and exchange. How might we engage in the ethical project of extending the range of ‘lives which are liveable’ (to paraphrase Sarah Ahmed), through performance, without enacting struggles for the recognition of difference that displace redistributive struggles that might better serve the ends of justice?

In exploring these ideas, I touch on recent theatrical and cultural representations of ‘public’ queer heroes – notably Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning – to begin to draw apart the mutual dependencies of narratives of valorisation and excoriation. This thinking draws structural analogies from two places: the precarious subjectivity theorised in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and the logic of a community which divides itself from itself articulated in Roberto Esposito’s Immunitas. In doing so, I offer the frame of exceptionality as way of thinking through the particular investments which sustain queer heroisms and martyrdoms, marking their useful limits but also describing their reparative possibilities.

Stephen Greer is Lecturer in Theatre Practices at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Contemporary British Queer Performance (Palgrave 2012) and his research focuses on the intersection of queer theory and live performance, including digital works and videogames. He is currently working on a monograph on exceptionality and solo performance. [email protected]

46 Maja Milatovic-Ovadia Hero or Villain? The story of a clean t-shirt (10 minute provocation)

Bosnia and Hercegovina is not making news today. The war ended eighteen years ago, yet society is strongly ethnically segregated, schools are teaching children different histories of the war and peace-building process is stagnating.

In this paper I will talk about the possible use of theatre in the process of reconciliation. Through the general overview of the work of the UK charity organization Most Mira (Bridge of Peace) that works with young people in northern Bosnia using art to instigate peace building, I will outline some issues related to the work in the circumstances where one couldn’t tackle the issues of war crimes and segregation in a straightforward and direct manner.

I will discuss few key issues: why going away from testimonial theatre projects is beneficial especially in the society where there is a strong disagreement over the conflict’s narrative, where one’s war hero is other’s war criminal and how the charity challenged distrust of the community, suspicion of the educational institutions and animosity of the officials; and why in theatre projects I have developed focuses on the use of comedy.

The paper was inspired and evidenced by the empirical observation and five year long personal experience as a facilitator. I would like to share this experience and open it to debate and dialogue.

Maja Milatovic-Ovadia is a freelance theatre director and PhD researcher at Kent University. She graduated Directing at the University of Belgrade and trained at the CSSD, National Theatre Studio, and Directors Lab West Los Angeles. She directed a string of critically acclaimed shows in the principal national theatres of Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia and UK. In addition, she is advisor and facilitator for Most Mira charity and she runs drama workshops for migrants and refugees at MRCF in London. www.majamilatovicovadia.com

47 Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Kat Low & Sue Mayo Never Flying Solo: The Collaborative, Ordinary Heroes (20-minute paper)

“I wanted to do something worthwhile. I wanted to marry the two worlds of drama and working with people – and thought I had invented the job as I had encountered nothing like it myself.” (Survey Respondent for Reasons to be Cheerful)

Bringing together both their interests in exploring the intentions and practices of the applied theatre practitioner, Kat and Sue will consider the possibility of ordinary heroism and to celebrate the qualities of courage, resilience and imagination where they occur. Kat is interested in examining further the notions of emotional labour and the care which are sometimes described in applied theatre practice, and has argued that this consideration of the work as labour (the idea we have worked hard and cared deeply) has always carried a strain of heroic martyrdom. She believes that such a view ignores the dialogical aspect of the work between facilitator and participant, the sometimes mutual benefit for both, and is interested in the celebration (not the patronisation) of more ordinary heroes or heroism. Similarly, Sue has conducted research into why people continue to do socially applied theatre, when the world stubbornly refuses to become peaceful and opportunities remain inaccessible to all. For our paper we have conducted another survey specifically examining the notion of reward and will present our findings at TaPRA. In particular we are interested in examining how people describe doing their practice and why they do their practice. We anticipate exploring how transparent are we as practitioners (and can we be?) about what we are doing this work for, and whether it is ok to be doing it for ourselves? We will argue towards the celebration of ordinary heroism, which may mean practitioners who collaborate with other ordinary heroes, take risks and find ways to synthesise their art and their social engagement.

Dr. Katharine E. Low is an applied theatre practitioner specialising in health communication is a lecturer in Applied Theatre and Community Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Since 2003, she has been researching and developing social theatre practices as an approach to sexual and reproductive health communication. Her interests lie in the field of arts & health, sexual health communication, teaching & learning, dementia care and prison theatre. She is

48 co-editing a book with Dr Veronica Baxter (University of Cape Town) entitled Performing Health & Wellbeing for Methuen Drama.

Sue Mayo is a freelance theatre maker who specialises in collaborative and participatory work. She has worked extensively in London and internationally. She is Convenor of the MA in Applied Theatre at Goldsmith’s, University of London, She is Associate Artist with Magic Me, and recently completed ten years of women’s intergenerational projects at The Women’s Library, recently documented in Wild Wild Women (Langford , Mayo, McAvinchey 2013) She is now engaged in the 11th project, based at Bishopsgate Institute, Out Spoken. Sue has worked as an evaluator and consultant. She has recently contributed two chapters to Performance & Community, edited by Dr Caoimhe McAvinchey.

Kay Hepplewhite Not holding out for an action hero rides again (10 minute provocation)

When I’m delivering participation workshops on my own, it can be difficult to see what went well, as I’m more focused on dealing with what isn’t working. It was good to spend time seeing the whole picture. Annie Rigby

Given the modesty promoted by an ethos of facilitation within many community theatre practices, and the emphasis on value to the participant, the opportunity to evaluate the work from the practitioner’s perspective is rare.

This presentation will build on the theme of the anti-hero, and consider an opposing model to an all-action hero for practitioners operating within applied and social theatre contexts. The presentation will ask, can the motivations of artists operating in participatory settings be more helpfully framed as anti- action, and what impact does this have on articulating their specific expertise?

This presentation will explore how the qualities of practitioners might be re- interrogated and reflective dialogue video methods contribute to a critique of their work. The presentation will utilize this research with artists who operate in participatory settings, drawing on their voices as annotation for their own (un-heroic) ‘actions’.

Kay Hepplewhite is a senior lecturer in performing arts at Northumbria University. She is undertaking a PhD exploring the expertise of applied theatre practitioners at The University of Manchester. Her article, ‘Here’s One I Made Earlier: dialogues on the construction of an applied theatre practitioner’ was published in Theatre, Dance 49 and Performance Training journal 2013, and ‘Here’s Another Nice Mess: using video in reflective dialogue research method’ will be published inRiDE, Journal of Applied Theatre this summer 2014.

Alison Reeves Heroism and Adventurism: Can Applied Theatre Practices give participants the experience of being the heroes and heroines of their own stories? (20 minute paper)

Move on Up! is part of a series of widening participation interactive Theatre in Education programmes at The University of Worcester, designed to raise educational aspirations. It was conceived for year 6 pupils about to go up to secondary school, to reflect on this transition and the challenges and pitfalls it presented to them.

I searched for stimulus material to create the dynamic of an adventure story that reflected and generated the excitement and fear of change. The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne provided the structure of this classic genre with characters stranded on a desert island.

Directing a team of four student actors and a stage manager I sought to promote the heroic ideal of using the skills needed to survive against adversity and to transpose it to a school context. The four characters discover talents and interests on the year 6 school trip and they endeavour to become the best version of themselves at their secondary school where these attributes have to be tested in a new environment.

Using interactive voting software helped to determine whether pupils could achieve the sense of control and ownership outlined in Boal’s theatre practice. The programme provides a number of points of intervention where participants could vote and influence the shape of the character’s stories and perhaps create heroes or anti – heroes depending on the decisions they make.

Boal wants participants to become the outspoken protagonists of their own stories or spectactors. This paper will investigate whether applied theatre practice can give participants a heroic experience by exploring the process of creating Move on Up! and the response to the programme from year 6 pupils in West Midlands schools.

Alison Reeves is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Worcester with a particular interest in Applied Theatre and Directing. She has recently directed four Theatre in

50 Education programmes (2011 – 2014) that aim to raise educational aspirations and develop widening participation. They have toured extensively and have formed the basis of her research exploring their potential to empower young people to make decisions on educational progression with a particular focus on the use of interactive voting software.

Lisa Woynarski Ecological Sentinels: Indigenous heroes or colonial cliché? (10 minute provocation)

Ecological heroes have been prevalent in much ecological performance work, particularly situating Indigenous peoples as responsible ecological sentinels, warning of harmful impacts of current lifestyles on land and animals. Examples of this include: Platform’s OilCity (2013) in which a Native Canadian activist makes a heartfelt plea about the sacred land around the Alberta tar sands, and Sila (2014) by Chantal Bilodeau in which an Inuit climate change advocate attempts to draw the attention of the world to the ecological crisis in the Arctic. To what extent do these portrayals valorise the work of Indigenous peoples and to what extent do they reinforce the trope of the ‘ecological Indian’. The ‘ecological Indian’ is a stereotype often employed to suggest a type of ecological nostalgia, which can also be considered as a reframing of colonial notions of ‘otherness’. The idea of traditional ecological knowledge can be read as a recasting of the colonial ideas of ‘primitive superstition, savage nobility, or ancestral wisdom’ which re-inscribes inequality where Indigenous knowledge is seen as ‘an object for science rather than as a kind of knowledge that could inform science’ (Cruikshank in Leduc 2010: 5). One of the intersection points between postcolonial and ecological thinking is environmental racism as a form of ecological imperialism. This is evident in the way ecological problems are transferred to ‘foreign’ places and with ‘climate change refugees’ - Indigenous people who are losing their costal/island homes to rising sea levels. This provocation asks the question: in what ways does performance celebrate courageous ecological Indigenous heroes and in which ways does it re-inscribe colonial values through the objectification of the ‘ecological Indian’ cliché?

Lisa Woynarski is a performance-maker, researcher, and ecodramaturg working at the intersection of performance and ecology. Currently a PhD candidate at Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, her research centres around the development and articulation of an ecological performance aesthetic, interrogating the way performance can foreground, reveal, and critique ecological relationships. Her practice involves creating new research-informed, community-engaged performances in urban green spaces, with her company Green Stage and performance collective Plantable. 51 Sally Mackey and Sarah Cole A Home fit for Heroes? Performing carer landscapes (20 minute paper)

Care Full and In-Kind were the public outcomes of a two year arts project by artist and academic Sarah Cole, working with ‘hidden carers’ in Islington, London. The first stage of the project (Care Full) used a range of arts practices within weekly workshops to develop ideas with the informal carers of partners, siblings, parents and children, finding ways of artistically framing responses to their bounded lives. The culmination of the project wasIn-Kind , a one to one performance in a re-fitted military ambulance that toured the borough. This vehicle was selected for its metaphor of being on the ‘front line’, where carers express their feeling of being embattled by the repetitions, emergencies and circumspection of their everyday lives.

We ask what this arts project contributes to an understanding of performing ‘heroic’ home landscapes.

Our paper acknowledges the quiet representation of heroism in Care Full and In-Kind. It considers, also, the vacillation between hero and martyr that might emerge from an enquiry into heroism and ‘duties’ of care in applied and social theatre. Because these are family members, emotions and behaviours are manifest in complex ways as duty, love and care interweave: the traits of the heroic are uncertain. In addition to asking questions of the ‘heroic’, we will look at how unseen, ‘hoovered away’ (as one participant said), entrenched home- scapes move from the performative to performance, reinterpreted in a small military van. To what extent are such seemingly hermetic places reinforced or challenged by such performance?

This presentation will include film, images and representation from a range of participant voices.

Sally Mackey is professor of applied theatre and performance at RCSSD and a Pro Dean. Her research interests within applied and socially engaged theatre include place, performance and ecologies. She is completing a three-year AHRC funded project as PI and a further 18 month AHRC project as Co-I, both around place and location. Together with Deirdre Heddon, she is co-editing a series, Performing Landscapes.

Sarah Cole is a visual artist whose practice involves the orchestration of collaborative encounters as a form of live research into lived experience. For the past ten years she

52 explored notions of care, pedagogy, performance and play, leading to outcomes such as: In-Kind, http://www.amillionminutes.org; Smother, an Artangel commission to work with very young parents http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2010/smother; and Nest, a project she devised with a team of creative practitioners over three years in a primary school, http://www.nest-life.com. Sarah is a Senior Lecturer at CSM, where her teaching practice on the BA Fine Art is concerned with site, situation and community.

Susan Haedicke Breaking a Legacy of Hatred: Friches Théâtre Urbain’sLieu Commun (20 minute paper)

In a violent incident in 2011 between rival gangs from Asnières and Gennevilliers in the banlieues north of Paris, a young boy was killed at the metro station Les Courtilles, located on the dividing line between the two towns. For the local young people, a sense of identity and self-worth is closely tied to where they live. Since there is a long-standing animosity between the two towns, one way for the youth to gain respect from their peers is to escalate hostilities with residents of the other town. City officials asked Sarah Harper, Artistic Director of the Paris-based street theatre company, Friches Théâtre Urbain, to develop a community-based art-making project to augment the work of the social workers, the police and others in defusing the situation. In Lieu Commun, an ongoing multi-generational artistic project developing over several years, Harper seeks to establish connections across difference and in dangerous and confrontational public spaces with an art-based community response to a serious social conflict. The project relies on heroism and risk, particularly on the part of the participants often viewed and treated as the enemy by the youth. Harper and her community collaborators in Lieu Commun seek to establish a peaceful re-appropriation of public space by the local inhabitants of the rival communities and to begin a healing process. The project thus asks how can we share a common space, and it looks for answers in the stories and experiences of an equal number of participants from both communities and, significantly, in the transformation of the contested site around the metro station into a shared public space of dialogue and debate. This paper will describe the many facets of this ongoing project as it explores hostile, often incompatible, notions of heroism in this complex environment and interrogates the project’s potential for efficacy in breaking the legacy of hatred and violence between the youth of the two towns.

Susan Haedicke is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Performance, and

53 Cultural Policy Studies at University of Warwick in the UK. She has recently published Contemporary Street Arts in Europe: Aesthetics and Politics (2013) with Palgrave Macmillan as well as several articles and book chapters on street arts over the last few years. She also has worked as a professional dramaturg in the UK, France and the United States. Her current research focuses on the performativity of community gardens.

Matt Jennings ‘Crows on the Wire’: Performances of Heroism and Sacrifice in Conflict Transformation and Policing in Northern Ireland (20 minute paper)

As Eagleton (2003) has pointed out, the aesthetic and political function of the role of the ‘tragic hero’ has been contested since Aristotle. The protagonist of tragedy may be a vehicle for collective reflection on the consequences of particular social actions and circumstances (in the theatre of Brecht and Boal, for example). It may also represent the ‘brave exemplar’, the extraordinary individual who is brought low by a ‘fatal flaw’ or ‘destiny’, according to Romantic literary criticism. Heroic narratives have frequently been used for wartime propaganda (Balfour, 2007; Hughes, 2011); yet Balfour, Hughes and Thompson (2009) have examined examples of performance in response to conflict that support fluid and challenging narratives of resistance and alternative history.

This 20-minute paper will examine Crows‘ on the Wire’, an applied theatre project addressing the ‘transition’ of the police force in Northern Ireland from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) to the Police Services Northern Ireland (PSNI) in November 2001, a key element of the Good Friday Peace Agreement (1998).

The play, written by Jonathon Burgess, is informed by stories of individual police officers and deals with the frustration, anger and disaffection felt amongst some members of the RUC at the time of transition. In 2013, this production was widely performed across Northern Ireland and included animated post- performance discussions. The project also involves an ongoing educational programme in schools and community groups, sometimes as a stimulus to instigate conversations between former combatants and security personnel.

This analysis will be framed by the contested definitions of ‘innocence’ and ‘victimhood’ in Northern Ireland; the political impasse over the 2013 ‘Haas talks’; and recent controversy over historical enquiries into acts of state and paramilitary violence.

54 Matt Jennings (University of Ulster) served as dramaturg for the playwright and the paper will incorporate video footage of the production, community responses to it and a seminar held at the International Community Arts Festival (ICAF) Rotterdam in 2014.

Dr Matt Jennings is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Ulster. Originally from Sydney, Matt has worked as a performer, writer, director and facilitator in Australia, Ireland, UK, Italy, Morocco and France. He has been based in Northern Ireland since 2001, where his experience of working in applied drama and conflict transformation has informed his research, practice and teaching.

Working Groups Session 4 + Business Meeting Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Matt Smith False Idols: The Applied Puppeteer as Meek Hero (20-minute lecture-performance using objects)

This lecture-performance concerns issues for the practitioner involved in controversial engagements with groups and specific communities. I will engage in debates about the role of the applied puppeteer through a historical example; a population control project in India developed by the celebrated hero of puppetry Bil Baird. I will contrast this example with my own PaR project with men incarcerated in immigration detention. I will problematize the notion of the workshop leader as meek hero using a few choice objects. This will connect with themes of, power, globalisation and ethics that are part of my current practice. The question considered will be; in the context of working with vulnerable identities how useful is the role of hero in the practice of applied theatre? The lecture-performance will playfully animate some of the issues involved in how to meekly work through the identities of artist/researcher/practitioner.

55 For over twenty years now I have been using puppetry in a number of unusual settings to engage groups in work that can be considered applied puppetry. This work has opened up many different and surprising results in workshops. I am describing this work critically and developing an advanced study of puppetry. This practice connects with my PhD thesis; Speaking the unspeakable. How can puppetry be engaged as a tool in applied theatre practice?

Matt Smith currently works as Senior Lecturer in Applied Theatre at The University of Portsmouth, UK. Matt is currently a PhD student at Royal Holloway University. Previously Matt led the undergraduate Community Drama programme at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, Liverpool, UK. He is also the artistic director for PickleHerring Theatre Company. Matt was a freelance artist for sixteen years, working in diverse settings such as schools, prisons, hospitals, environmental agencies, and with the homeless. Matt’s work is always eclectic, working across disciplines such as drama, puppetry, masks, and music.

Cath Heinemeyer Storytelling and/or drama with teenagers: who provides the raw material for cultural democracy? (10 minute provocation)

A storytelling workshop and a drama session appear to belong to the same family within community arts. Yet, the different role and practices of the storyteller versus the facilitator reflect deep-seated beliefs about where the ‘source materials’ of creativity lie.

Are all the raw materials for creative work already present in the participants’ life experiences, and do they simply need drawing out using facilitation processes? What is lost and gained if, instead, a storyteller centres a workshop on a new story from another social sphere - inviting participants to assimilate its themes, heroes and archetypes, and then transform it for their own?

This choice influences the ‘energy profile’ of a session, introduces shadow sides, and perhaps contradicts key tenets of the community arts movement. We might read literally the Shelton Trust’s 1984 Campaign for Cultural Democracy, which demanded that people should be ‘taking part in the telling of the story, not having a story told to them.’ (Malcolm Dickson, Art With People, 1995, p.24) Might the storyteller’s heritage-laden voice drown out those of the participants?

However, both the modelling of storytelling as a practice, and the complex characters and motivations of the heroes of the stories we choose for adolescents,

56 can offer alternative, unexpected possibilities to young people in their own performance and creative work. As Jack Zipes (Creative Storytelling, 1995) suggests, a socially and politically aware use of multiple stories can help young people gain mastery of narrative forms, to deploy for their own purposes.

In this provocation, my arguments are fed by my practice-based research as a storyteller collaborating with theatre practitioners in contexts including: a) a drama group for teenagers with additional needs, b) a youth club for immigrants and refugees and c) an alternative secondary education setting. I attempt to model the dynamics of a storytelling workshop, including both its risks and possibilities.

Cath Heinemeyer is a storyteller interested in what storytelling has to offer the worlds of education, youth work, sustainability and community development. She is currently undertaking practice-based PhD research into storytelling with, for and by adolescents. She is based at the International Centre for Arts and Narrative, a joint initiative of York Theatre Royal and York St John University.

57 20th-21st Century Performer Training Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Dick McCaw with Mark Evans Questions of Documentation

Peter Hulton and I spent twelve years (1994 – 2006) creating DVD and DVD ROM documentations of teachers and artists who led workshops as part of the International Workshop Festival. We have produced 10 DVD ROM documentations and about 80 DVD documentations.

I am now working with Art Films to produce Peter’s recording of Discussions with IWF workshop leaders. This will be streamed on Vimeo on licenses issued from Art Films. All this activity makes me asks a few questions for some of which Peter and I have answers.

• What are we documenting? • How? (Changes in means of capture and in means of storage). • What is the relation between the documentation and the practice of the workshop leader? • Why do we continue to produce these documentations? • Who are they for? • How will they be used in the future?

I propose to show a video clip and supporting material from a DVD ROM and discuss our working process. I shall then try and answer some of the above questions, and others that arise over the summer months. I shall then enter into dialogue with Mark Evans, after which the discussion will open to the room.

Dick McCaw was co-founder of the Actors Touring Company in 1978, and of the Medieval Players in 1981. Between 1993 and 2001 he was Director of the International Workshop Festival for whom he curated 9 festivals. Since 2002 he has been an independent researcher and senior lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has edited two books, With an Eye for Movement (on Warren Lamb’s development of Rudolph Laban’s movement theories) for Brechin Books (2005) and

58 The Laban Sourcebook for Routledge (2011) and is now working on a book on Mikhail Bakhtin and Russian Theatre. He is a qualified Feldenkrais practitioner.

Mark Evans is Professor of Theatre Training and Education at Coventry University and Associate Dean of the School of Art and Design. He has written on Jacques Copeau, movement training for the modern actor and the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq. He is currently editing the Actor Training Reader (Routledge), co-editing the Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq (Routledge), and writing a book on Performance, Movement and the Body for Palgrave. He is an Associate Editor of the Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal, and a co-convenor of the Performer Training Working Group.

Trevor Rawlins Actor training in the digital age – reflections on practice

My research, springing from my 2012 PhD thesis, has been focused on questions around actor training in the digital age. My current research project asks the question, how can actor training methodologies respond to the implications of the digital revolution and the resultant alterations in working processes? This a key question for the Conservatoire sector, and one that is further problematised by the cultural and aesthetic shifts associated with digital revolution.

The project places one final year student on the BA (Hons) Acting programme at GSA/University of Surrey (Amy Blair) and one acting tutor (me) in the roles of actors in three different scenarios. The work is recorded on video during rehearsal phases (by GSA acting students), and later shot as filmed performance. The rehearsal workshops and filmed performances are directed by a variety of GSA staff. Reflections on the process by all participants are also recorded. Phase 1 of the project (the rehearsal of two contrasting scenes) has been completed. Phase 2 (the actual filming of those scenes) will happen in May 2014. Phase 3 (the making of an original short film) is scheduled to happen in July 2014.

Dr Trevor Rawlins is Head of Acting at GSA/University of Surrey and has been an actor and director for 25 years. He completed his PhD thesis - “Studying Acting: An investigation into contemporary actor training in the UK” - at University of Reading (2012). He has taught acting at ALRA, Birmingham School of Speech and Drama, Drama Centre, East 15, Italia Conti, and the Royal Conservatoire Scotland. He was MA Course Director in the Education Department at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Recent conference presentations include at MECCSA, “Acting with Facts” (University of Reading) and for the University of York Small Screen Conference.

59 Marisa Zanotti Passing Strange and Wonderful: The development of a choreographic App

In this presentation artist-academic Marisa Zanotti will talk about the Passing Strange and Wonderful App project. This initiative was funded by Arts Council of England as a pilot project in association with choreographer Ben Wright bgroup, and the composer and programmer Alan Stones. The App is a tool for the exploration and expansion of intermedial practice. The App was exhibited at Dance Umbrella alongside screenings of the Passing Strange and Wonderful film made available online over four days. The presentation will explore the creation and development process, the opportunities and challenges that working with mobile technologies in training offer, and the artistic drivers that led the project. The App can be downloaded onto a phone or tablet (not a computer) by going to the bgroup website at the Passing Strange and Wonderful page. www.bgroup.org

Marisa Zanotti trained at the Laban Centre and worked extensively as a dancer and choreographer. Her professional practice since 2003 has been in commissioned moving image work in installation, screendance and film drama with funding from Scottish Arts Council, ACE, UK Film Council, BBC and the National Lottery. Marisa was a guest lecturer at Glasgow School of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches in the dance department at University of Chichester. She is currently completing doctoral research into frameworks for adaptation from live dance to the screen. Marisa’s recent moving image projects are detailed on her website www.marisazanotti.co.uk.

Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Tom Cantrell and Christopher Hogg From Drama School to Albert Square: Training and the Camera on a Modern British Soap

This paper will explore the interface between training for live performance and training for mediatised performance. Specifically, it will interrogate the rehearsal and preparatory processes associated with soap opera, and their relationship to drama school training. The paper will feature new interview material with a young actor and a director who both recently trained at drama school and who have worked extensively on soap. Our paper will examine the ways in which one director has consciously remodelled her approach to working with actors for her

60 screen directing. We will focus on one particular example of training between a director and actor working on a UK soap opera.

Despite ongoing developments in relevant scholarship, a long-standing snobbery about soap acting still exists within critical discourses. This paper probes beyond such critical snobbery to instead investigate British soap opera as a form of television production which poses unique challenges for actors and directors of actors. We analyse the challenges of working on an open-ended format, in which a character’s past, present and future are in a constant state of potential flux. How did our case study actor develop her character when the circumstances she found herself in, as well as her history, can be re-configured for new storylines? This is a feature inherent in soap which asks questions of existing theoretical frameworks about acting, as well as theatre-based actor- training approaches.

Dr Tom Cantrell is Acting Head of Theatre at the University of York. He has published two books on acting. The first, Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People (Palgrave, 2010) was co-edited with Professor Mary Luckhurst. The book is a collection of interviews with high-profile actors who have portrayed real people on stage and screen, and as such was the first of its kind. His second book, a monograph entitled Acting in Documentary Theatre, (Palgrave 2013) was the first to analyse how actors approach verbatim and documentary theatre.

Dr Christopher Hogg is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University and Course Leader for the BA Media degree. The incorporation and analysis of direct interview insights from industry professionals working within television and film constitutes a core component of Hogg’s research. This includes interview articles with Stephen Poliakoff (2009) and Gub Neal (2011) for The Journal of British Cinema and Television. More recently, his 2013 article for New Review of Film and Television Studies, investigated the international translation of British television drama formats using interviews with television industry professionals, including independent British producer Simon Wright.

Jon Burtt Video feedback and the teaching of physical expertise: teaching strategies using easily accessible tools for optimizing the training environment

Students learning physical skills such as dance or circus arts benefit from access to a variety of perspectives in the actual training environment with which to compare their own perceptions of their performance of required skills with the actual physical results. 61 In this paper I discuss various video feedback techniques I use in my own teaching practice. In particular I focus on the use of first person and third person video perspectives to help students link the appropriate kinesthetic and visual cues with the relevant motor skills required to achieve optimal performance of a particular movement.

Drawing on my experience as researcher-in-residence at the National Circus School of Montreal in 2011-2012, I explore the use of hands-on tools such as Go Pro cameras and readily available motion analysis software. The strategies discussed aim to help teachers build scaffolded learning environments that allow their students to easily access visual representations of performed movements, to compare their own results with those of expert models, and to use other readily accessible tools to analyse their movement in the actual training environment.

Jon Burtt is a director, choreographer and performer working in intermedia performance, combining dance, physical theatre, circus, interactive technology, video and text. Jon has attracted significant critical acclaim and national and international recognition for his directorial and choreographic work, which has toured extensively throughout Australia and Asia and has represented Australia in diplomatic initiatives in both India and China. His work has been presented in major festivals such as Shanghai International Arts Festival, the Sydney International Arts Festival and the Perth International Arts Festival. He is currently a Lecturer in Dance and Performance Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Hannu Tuisku The Stranger by Baudelaire and all the actor needs, in two minutes (provocation)

The research project Actor’s Art in Modern Times run at the Theatre Academy Helsinki produced a small number of operational concepts that aim to cover the entire actor’s craft (or at least the core of it, that which makes acting acting). In my training practice with young non-professionals I have still reduced the number of concepts used. In my provocative position statement I claim that the two-minute video clip on two young amateurs performing Baudelaire’s poem The Stranger by using these last concepts standing will display the very essence of acting. Video is used here primarily for reflection: the actors cannot see themselves acting and their perception of the fellow actor’s acting is also vague. Does filming training help to point out specific moments in the flow oftraining situation (moments that would be difficult to grasp otherwise) and in this way enhance the process or does it, on the contrary, make this flow turn to stone?

62 How can we share the extraordinary fruits of observation that, without filming, would remain the privilege of the trainer? Does this video clip imply that the (almost) unobservable in the training process – the sensations − can be made perceivable by filming training?

Hannu Tuisku is an educator and theatre director. He is a doctoral candidate and project researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki/Theatre Academy. His primary interest in research is in actor training methods and their applications in youth theatre education; he has published articles on these topics. Currently, he is working on a project that establishes workshops in embodied actor training in professional theatres and directing a play in Kouvola City Theatre. He is also Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Kallio Upper Secondary School of Performing Arts, Helsinki. He is a member of Interdisciplinary Improvisation performance group. Contacts: hannu. [email protected]

Michael Morgan Screen Intimacy: Training Actors to be Intimate for/ to/ with the Camera

This presentation addresses performance requirements for the actor to develop on-screen intimacy, as experienced by the spectator in a film’s reception. Such intimacy has been attributed largely to an actor’s “submission” to the camera, having their performance “captured” on film (Potter, 2014).

In narrative cinema, the dominant trend of psychological realism demands an actor obey the “fourth wall”, denying the existence of the camera, yet allowing it to observe their action (Churcher, 2011). However, there are alternative conventions which demand an actor has a different relationship with the camera and therefore with the spectator viewing the film.

In films such as ‘Breaking the Waves’ (Trier, 1996) or ‘Amelie’ (Jeunet, 2001) the actors look or talk directly to the camera, however rather than distancing the spectator, they invite them into an intimate relationship with the character.

I seek to challenge the traditional convention forbidding the use of cameras in training, arguing that it is also necessary to develop an actor’s camera awarenessfor different potential relations to the spectator. I will try to define the range of possible intimate connections from the “submissive” to the “confrontational”, by offering examples from films. I hope the group might respond by discussingwhich performance methods, techniques and processes may be implemented into an actor’s training, while also giving examples from my own coaching practice.

63 Michael Morgan currently teaches acting for screen at the European Film College in Denmark. His teaching and coaching practice crosses actor training and film production. He has ongoing academic and artistic research relating to performance aesthetics and narrative cinema.

Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

Jessica Beck Emotional connection and consistency for film acting: A short introduction to Alba Emoting (workshop)

“The difference – the fundamental difference between theatre acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.” – James Lipton

Lipton’s observation that film acting is ‘disjunctive’ recognizes the challenges that actors face when shooting scenes out of sequence, or having to repeat emotional moments for numerous takes. A solution to these difficulties can be found in a psychophysical training developed by Chilean neuroscientist Susana Bloch. Alba Emoting (also now called the Alba Method of Emotions by US practitioners) is a somatic approach to summon emotion at will through respiratory-facial-postural actions that trigger the physiological components of emotion. Bloch identifies six primary emotional effector patterns – Anger, Tenderness, Fear, Eroticism, Sadness and Joy. Bloch developed a ‘step-out’ technique that neutralizes the effector patterns offering the actor an element of control, so that the patterns can be explored safely. With this tool, an actor can raise and lower their heart rate as well as produce laughter or tears. In addition, one can recognize mixed emotions, dissolve emotional entanglements, and develop awareness of (and find freedom from) habitual emotional effector patterns. While useful for all types of acting, Alba Emoting training offers film actors a reliable and direct pathway to generate the physiological changes that occur during an emotion. This one-hour workshop will offer an introduction to two of the emotional effector patterns, the neutral breath and ‘step-out’ and a short discussion/film.

Dr Jessica Beck theatre director and somatic practitioner completed her PhD at University of Exeter. Beck completes the Feldenkrais Professional Training

64 Programme in 2015, is a certified practitioner of the Alba Emoting Method and teaches directing at Canterbury Christ Church University. Publications include: Theatre, Performance and ‘The Century of the Brain’: The Influences of Cognitive Neuroscience on Professional Theatre Practice’ in Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to Medical Humanities, Routledge, pp. 186 – 205 (2014) and ‘Alba Emoting and Emotional Melody: Surfing the Emotional Wave in Cachagua, Chile’ in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Vol. 1(2), pp. 141-156 (2010).

Christina Kapadocha Actor training and the camera: the documentation of a somatic approach to acting

In this paper/practice demonstration I will disclose the formulation of a somatic approach to psychophysical actor training as documented by the use of camera. I engage with a holistic process that prepares the actor for all the kinds of performance expression taking as foundation the cultivation of an integrated embodied perception and experience. I do so by applying a somatic approach to movement education into the actor training process. The development of my practice emerges from my current Practice as Research project at RCSSD titled: Being an actor, becoming a trainer: the transition from subjective to inter-subjective experience in a somatic acting process. The practice is underpinned by Linda Hartley’s IBMT (Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy) somatic approach (Hartley 1995), which is developed along the lines of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s somatic technique of Body-Mind Centering. Through the use of the camera in the room of ‘self-exploration’ and the work with ‘others’, I will discuss the development of an actor training process in the reversed ‘intersubjective’ experience through which the actor becomes the trainer.I concentrate on the use of somatic metaphor in kinaesthetic exercises that re-approach the experience of kinaesthetic empathy in the actor-trainer relationship, coming up with the notion of embodied logos. I finally raise issues in the documentation process, including the resistance to the presence of the camera in group environments, such as in workshops and classrooms.

Christina Kapadocha is an actor, somatic educator (IBMT) and practice-based PhD candidate at RCSSD. Her research explores the formulation of a somatic approach to psychophysical actor training. Greek National Theatre Drama School and E15 Acting School alumni, Christina teaches somatics and actor training, she directs workshops and performs in London. She has also trained and performed in Bali (ISI) and Moscow (GITIS).

65 Working Groups Session 4 & Business Meeting Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Libby Worth ‘There are children here somewhere, I can smell them’. Robert Helpmann and the making of an on-screen villain – the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Robert Helpmann (1909 – 1986) was best known as a ballet dancer, choreographer and stage actor but his career in film was substantial and extended through much of his life once he had ‘retired’ as a ballet dancer. Set within the context of current debates on the links between dance and film (dance/film, filmed dance, film as choreography) this paper will focus on analysis of Helpmann’s film performances and how he drew on his prodigious dance experience to create and sharpen his roles. There were strong links in the early 20C between modern dance and film actor training for silent movies that will be referenced (François Delsarte, Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis). However, Helpmann devised a parallel but distinctive means of incorporating dance techniques into film acting. The primary illustrations will be drawn from his UK film roles including early Powell and Pressburger productions and his role as the Child Catcher in the later family film of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This latter role was referenced in 2012 London Olympic Games Opening Ceremony and retains its power to disturb. I will argue that in large measure this is due to Helpmann’s ability to draw on and adapt his dance skills within the film environment.

Libby Worth is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London and a Feldenkrais practitioner. She has published writing in the field of dance/theatre on Anna Halprin, Jenny Kemp, Mabel Todd, Caryl Churchill and Ian Spink and has co-edited with Richard Cave, Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist (2012). She co-devised the performance Step Feather Stitch (2012) with visual artist Julie Brixey-Williams and is working on a new duet. She is currently co-writing a book with Jasmin Vardimon on Vardimon’s work and is guest editor for Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal special edition on the Feldenkrais Method. She is co-convenor of the TaPRA Performer Training Working Group.

66 Jay Paul Skelton How Mary Overlie and Anne Bogart’s ‘Viewpoints’ might support and enhance Stanislavsky’s technique of active analysis’ (Paper with demonstration)

Sir Peter Hall suggests in Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players that the challenges presented to the contemporary classical actor is to achieve “a balance between discipline and freedom which only the great creative genius or the astonishing performer can achieve”. This paper presents early research toward the creation of an integrated rehearsal methodology that addresses Hall’s paradox by combining aspects of the “system”, as articulated by Constantin Stanislavsky, and Viewpoints, originally developed by choreographer Mary Overlie and further adapted by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau. In philosophy and practice, the “system” and Viewpoints are both powerful and persuasive, yet in my experience as practitioner, lecturer, student and audience member, neither technique alone is enough to help actors balance textual clarity, psychological truth and rigorous physicality in performance of classical text. My paper will specifically address how Viewpoints might support and enhance Stanislavsky’s technique of active analysis, and will include initial findings from three “rehearsal laboratories” related to productions of Seneca’s Medea for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and The Comedy of Errors and As You Like It by William Shakespeare for the International Youth Arts Festival. I hope this research might contribute not only to the continuing reassessment of the “system” by both academics and practitioners, but also to the exploration of Viewpoints as a logical extension of Stanislavsky’s theories.”

Jay Paul Skelton is a practice-as-research doctoral candidate at Kingston University. He most recently directed for the 2014 International Youth Arts Festival and 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He was Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame (2004-2012) and served as Artistic Director of the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, the professional theatre in residence. He currently lectures at both Kingston University and the University of Notre Dame London Program. He received his MFAfrom The Theatre School (DePaul University) and MA from Kingston University. Jay has written, produced, or directed over 100 productions in London, Boston, New York, and Chicago.

Janine Cowell Exposing an enigma: researching the practice of musical theatre training in the UK

For the outsider, the little documented process of musical theatre training may

67 appear as a somewhat enigmatic practice. For the first two years of a three-year vocational course, trainees are ‘protected’ from the gaze of both the public eye and, to an extent, the outside professional eye. Trainees are usually not permitted to undertake any professional performance work whilst training unless granted permission by the institution. Whilst industry professionals may be invited into an institution to work with students, the initiation and arrangements regarding these exchanges remain strictly controlled by programme directors and members of staff. The closed nature of vocational training sets a number of challenges for the researcher when thinking about methodological approach.

This provocation will consider my current PhD research on vocational musical theatre training in the UK. I will think about the currently blurred boundaries between the theoretically grounded academy and the vocational training institution, furthering this with a specific focus on how (and why) we might deal with documenting this practice-driven form.

Janine Cowell trained at the Arts Educational School, London, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Musical Theatre. She completed an MA in Performance Research at the University of Bristol and is currently undertaking her PhD at the University of Bristol and the University of Exeter as the recipient of a Collaborative Doctoral Studentship. Janine’s teaching work ranges from coaching for public speaking to adult ballet classes. This year, she is co-coordinating the Drama stream of the Access to Bristol programme at the University of Bristol and, in January, will begin work as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Exeter.

Konstantinos Thomaidis co-convenes 20th-21st Century Performer Training Working Group and is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Portsmouth. He co-founded the Centre for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies and co-convenes the Performer Training WG at TaPRA. He is currently editing Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience for Routledge. He is the editor of The Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, the Artistic Director of Adrift Performance Makers and an Associate Artist of the New Theatre Royal, Portsmouth. His latest articles appeared in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (Routledge), Studies in Musical Theatre (Intellect) and Gestures of Music Theater(Oxford University Press).

68 Directing and Dramaturgy Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Adam J. Ledger The director and adaptation: radical revisioning in the work of Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam

The Toneelgroep Amsterdam (TGA), led by director Ivo van Hove, has produced work that is contemporary, energetic, visual, athletic and emotional. But TGA rarely produces new writing; van Hove is particularly drawn to adaptations of film scripts, classic American drama and, most recently, novels. Van Hove’s relationship with designer Jan Versweyfeld has fuelled radical stagings of source material, performed always in contemporary dress and spaces which often offer actors and spectators new modes of engagement with the original; van Hove’s work can be seen as intermedial adaptation within ‘environments’.

This paper aims to trace what working on adaptations affords van Hove as a director. Two productions will especially be discussed: Scenes from a Marriage (2005; Barbican Centre, 2013) and TGA’s latest production, an adaptation of the novel Fountainhead (Ayn Rand). The first dispensed with van Hove’s trademark video screens to offer conscious hyper-naturalism within a deconstructed theatrical space, which drew attention to the act of performance, repetition and multiple character portrayal. My observation of rehearsals for Fountainhead will seek to demonstrate some of the processes of van Hove’s directorial revisioning. I also make reference to TGA’s Roman Tragedies (2007) and van Hove’s London production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (Young Vic, 2014). I suggest that van Hove’s approach to adaptation is really one of radical deviation in form rather than content or original text, which, in turn, leads to work that is re- wrought in its relationship to the spectator.

Adam J Ledger is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. His research interests centre on performance practice: current publication projects include The Director and Directing: Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre and an edited collection on devising and adaptation. Adam has published frequently on the work of Odin Teatret. His practice as research includes Caravania!, which toured nationally, and Igloo with The Bone Ensemble.

69 Melissa Poll Auteur-ing Adaptation: Robert Lepage Re-‘Writes’ The Nightingale

While considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to adaptations of canonical source texts, adaptation’s potential to revive seldom-produced works often deemed ‘unstageable’ remains largely unexplored in current scholarship. Within the context of contemporary performance’s postdramatic turn and the de-privileging of dramatic text, this paper theorizes how Québécois auteur Robert Lepage’s scenographic dramaturgy, a process of adaptation in which extant works are re-‘written’ via highly physical and visual performance texts, completes Igor Stravinsky’s atypically structured, one act symphonic poem, The Nightingale, in production.

A brief outline of the open-ended dramaturgy featured in atypical operas and the genre’s increased availability to auteur-ed performance texts will foreground my case study of Lepage’s adaptation of Stravinsky’s source text, The Nightingale and Other Short Fables. This 2009 production incorporatesThe Nightingale into a broader program of short compositions organized around a common theme and stylistic period in Stravinsky’s oeuvre, contextualizing and highlighting the symphonic poem’s score. I will explore the ways in which Lepage creates a hyper-aestheticized, twenty-first century version ofThe Nightingale’s nineteenth century chinoiserie, offering a post-Orientalist comment on globalization and cultural commodification. By overwriting the production’s narrative with a scenographic conceit based on the evolution of puppetry, which features acrobatic shadow play, Taiwanese hand puppets and Vietnamese water puppetry performed in an orchestra pit flooded with twenty-seven tons of water, Lepage demonstrates how light, space, sound, movement and puppetry can shape and develop open-ended texts, providing the external dramaturgical framework necessary to expand an incomplete extant score into a full-length opera.

Melissa Poll is currently in the final term of a Drama & Theatre Studies PhD at the University of London, Royal Holloway. Since completing a BFA in Acting and an MA in Theatre History and Criticism at the University of British Columbia, she has worked as a professional actor, adjunct professor and freelance theatre critic (The British Theatre Guide). Her current research focuses on scenography and interculturalism in Robert Lepage’s extant text productions. Melissa has published in Body, Space & Technology Journal and Canadian Theatre Review. Forthcoming publications include an article in this autumn’s Theatre Research in Canada.

70 Mark Robson Who’s there? Hospitality, Originality, Adaptation

An apparently simple question: Who’s there? The ethical dimension of this question is – as Derrida has proposed – held both in the demand made and in the response that the movement of identification elicits. It is a question of hospitality, but it is one that opens on to an ethical field that raises issues for notions of identification, categorization, and so on, that also affect adaptation.

This paper will focus on a single, complex example: Théâtre du Soleil’sLes Naufragés du Fol espoir is a text described as ‘mi-écrit’ by Helene Cixous. This notion of the mi-écrit (half-written, but with an echo of mi-cuit, part-cooked, even half-baked) points in two directions, to the unfinished Jules Verne tale that Cixous drew on and to the collaborative process of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Soleil company in producing the performed piece from Cixous’s ‘unfinished’ script.

The piece itself is focused on a utopian moment in which a socialist-inspired company attempt to make a film, which becomes a metatheatrical exposure of the processes of creation and the utopian dimension of Soleil’s own project, according with certain ideas that Cixous has expressed about the ‘democratic’ potential of theatre in relation to other kinds of artistic practice, and in particular to other forms of (her own) writing.

This production is, then, an especially promising point of departure for thinking through issues of originality, creativity and invention in adaptation.

Mark Robson holds the Chair in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Dundee, where he directs the MLitt in Theatre Studies, a collaboration with the Dundee Rep theatre. He is also a playwright and in 2013 had a year-long attachment to the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Catherine Love By the Book: Adaptation, Work and Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz

Gatz, Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, staged every

71 last word of F Scott Fitzgerald’s text in a performance that lasted eight hours with a dinner break - the exact length of the average working day. Through this simple but surprising conceit, audiences were invited to consider the work of the performers feeling their way through the challenges of staging a book; the artistic labour expended by Fitzgerald in crafting the original; the everyday drudgery invoked by the office setting, doubled with the fact of the performers’ own labour in putting on the show night after night; and the work demanded of audience members themselves, who were required to break the usual temporal division of work and leisure to experience the eight-hour performance, which was popularly framed as an act of endurance for all involved.

As a prism through which to view ideas about theatre and work, Gatz offers myriad facets, making explicit through its staging many of the tensions between labour and leisure that the theatrical machinery usually strives to conceal. Working from the proposition that adaptation offers particularly fertile ground for exploring contested ideas about artistic labour and hierarchies of creation, this paper explores a number of those tensions, with the desire to shift popular understandings of theatre away from the idea of the individual genius and towards a recognition of collaborative creative labour.

Catherine Love is about to begin an AHRC funded PhD in the Drama Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her thesis will investigate the status of the text in contemporary British theatre, looking at both the theatre text itself and at the various cultural institutions that support and perpetuate its current understanding and use within a 21st-century British context. She is also a freelance arts journalist and theatre critic and writes regularly for titles including The Guardian, Exeunt and The Stage.

Benjamin Fowler Katie Mitchell’s theatricalisation of the novel: Innovating form, excavating subjectivity

“On or about December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf (Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,1924), announcing the arrival of modernity. With this infamous sentence, Woolf attempted to explode the stratifying rhetoric of nineteenth century social and artistic hierarchies (“masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children”) in order to energize modernist innovations in society, politics and literature. Almost 100 years on, director Katie Mitchell’s intermedial performance creations force film, novel, poetry and theatre into collision, in a body of work inaugurated by her theatricalisation of Woolf ’s novel The Waves (National Theatre, 2006).

72 This paper scrutinizes the (at least) double process of adaptation that occurs during such an operation, arguing that Mitchell’s appropriation of largely modernist, literary material is congruent with the aims of theatrical experimentation designed to contest the hierarchical stratification of media— allowing, as Kattenbelt argues, ‘new dimensions of perception and experience to be explored’. Turning towards novels gives Mitchell the raw material to explore theatre (and identity) in the post-digital age, doing through performance what Woolf did through literature – exploring shifts in subjectivity that, until recently, the novel had been best placed to document and illustrate. This paper, then, ponders the political and ethical implications of Mitchell’s brand of theatrical modernism as it emerges in the early 21st century.

Benjamin Fowler is completing a PhD (at Warwick University) exploring the relationship between text and performance in the work of Katie Mitchell and Thomas Ostermeier. After graduating from an MFA in Theatre Directing in 2008, Ben spent four years as a freelance director and assistant director, with companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Almeida Theatre, and the Manchester Royal Exchange, as well as three months in Japan as associate director on a production of Romeo and Juliet in Japanese. Shakespeare Bulletin has just published his first peer- reviewed essay on The Wooster Group and the RSC.

Rebecca Benzie Adapting the past: Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s reconstruction of the Suffragette woman for a twenty first century audience.

This paper will explore the adaptation of history in contemporary dramaturgy, in particular in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s feminist representation of the Suffragette movement in the National Theatre’s 2008 production ofHer Naked Skin. This play builds on a cultural understanding of the period, adapting historical knowledge and narrative to create a piece of fiction. Focusing on the reconstruction of the Suffragette woman, I will consider how this production could influence an audience’s understanding of women in a political role and how this might impact contemporary constructions of gender. How a playwright dramaturgically adapts history tells one as much about the contemporary moment in which the work is created, as it does about the historical period under interpretation. By investigating how Lenkiewicz, along with the director and actors, attends to 1913 London in Her Naked Skin I will explore how the reconstruction of Suffragette actions and political principles, could be perceived as an authentic portrayal of the period in question. I intend to approach authenticity on stage, addressing it not as an accurate material copy of a time period but rather as a reimagining that speaks to the concerns and structures of feeling of the moment 73 under consideration. I aim to explore potential problems that could arise if ‘original’ elements from the Suffragette movement are searched for at the heart of this production, hypothesising instead that a fluid relationship between the playwright and the original tone of the movement can be negotiated. Overall, all history is a kind of adaptation and I propose to further investigate this concept through Lenkiewicz’s dramaturgical representation of the political woman in Her Naked Skin.

Panel Sessions 1 Thursday 4th September 11.30-1.00pm

Adrian Curtain The Neo-Futurists(’) Take on Eugene O’Neill’sStrange Interlude

In 2009 the Neo-Futurists, a celebrated American experimental theatre company, presented their take on Eugene O’Neill’s nine-act play Strange Interlude (1928) at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. The production was both rapturously and rancorously received, achieving standing ovations and walkouts. At the first performance, an audience member voiced his displeasure from the balcony, rhetorically asking the performers why they were ‘butchering this play, this beautiful play’, before storming out. He was not a plank. Why did this production garner such polarised responses?

The Neo-Futurists, led by their founder Greg Allen, adopted their unique aesthetic, inspired by Italian futurism, dadaism, surrealism, and fluxus, in adapting O’Neill’s play. The Neo-Futurists delight in brevity, spontaneity, lightness of touch, audience interaction, and game playing. Strange Interlude is, on the face of it, a peculiar match for the Neo-Futurists given the play’s earnestness, verbiage, and length, but this aesthetic mismatching may be what made the production so rewarding for some and infuriating for others.

This production offered a meta-commentary on the act of staging this ‘problem’ play — a play that seems to have an idealised existence on the page, in O’Neill’s imagining. Consequently, The Neo-Futurists’ Strange Interlude offers insight not only into O’Neill’s play but into his authorial presence in the text, the construction of his authority and canonicity, the historicity of modernist experimentation, as well as the fundamental, often overlooked strangeness of dramatic theatre itself. This paper ponders the neo-future of postmodern stagings of modernist texts, using this inventive, irreverent production as a case study.

74 Adrian Curtin is a lecturer in the Drama department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He has written journal articles and book chapters on theatre sound, musical performance, and modernism. He is a recipient of a Presidential Fellowship from Northwestern University and the 2010 winner of the New Scholar’s Prize, awarded by the International Federation of Theatre Research.

Pedro de Senna From text to dance-theatre: a version of Carthage/Cartagena

Carthage/Cartagena is a new play by American playwright Caridad Svich. Written in verse and described as “ten cantos and a prayer for performance”, the text has no ascribed characters. It is a Carta Ajena, a letter from afar, from alien voices in English and Spanish, speaking (or perhaps chanting) of dislocation, human trafficking and war. A production currently under development by SignDance Collective takes the script as a starting point to create a version of the piece in the company’s unique brand of SignDance Theatre – a form of Dance-Theatre that has Sign Language as its choreographic basis and structuring dramaturgical/gestural device.

Inflected by understandings of Disability and Deaf Studies, this paper examines the creative process of the company, and explores the ways in which the poetic language of the text is adapted to choreographic form; and how this in turn shapes the dramaturgy and narrative threads experienced by audiences. Svich herself has suggested that “the body in space is the cultural sign that is constantly being deciphered in performance” (2003: 11). This is particularly true of SignDance Theatre, when the deciphering of the body as it moves in space mayor may not be informed by linguistic competence in Sign Languages. Here, processes of translation are also involved in both the construction and readership of the piece, further complicating the relationship between the original text and the adapted performance.

Pedro de Senna is a theatre practitioner and academic. He was born in Rio de Janeiro, where he started performing in 1993, and has an MA in Theatre: text and production from the University of East Anglia. He is a lecturer in Contemporary Theatre and Programme Leader for the BA Theatre Arts (Theatre Directing) at Middlesex University. His research interests include Translation and Adaptation Studies, Directing and Dramaturgy, and Disability and Performance. He is a member of the SCUDD Executive Committee, and convenes the working group on Diversity in the Discipline.

75 Silvija Jestrovic Re-writing the Author: Chekhov as Intertextual Protagonist

This paper will investigate works where playwright Anton Chekhov appears as a protagonist using Raymond Carver’s short story Errand as a point of departure and focusing on two adaptations: Howard Barker’s play Vanya and Ivana Vujic’s staging of the Three Sisters. Carver’s short story invokes the authorial presence, somewhat paradoxically, through death, in Barker’s parodic subversion of Uncle Vanya, the author/predecessor joins his own fictional characters, in Vujic’s staging, the Three Sisters are very old and Chekhov appears on stage as a ghost- like figure of father/ God. All three works, in different ways, involve “the death of the author”, further engaging and problematising Roland Barthes’ famous notion, not only on the conceptual level, but also on the dramaturgical one. The death of the author turns into dramaturgical feature, a plot-structuring device, and ultimately into a perfromative action. This essay asks how does the author/ predecessor function as a perfroamtive figure within the matrix of intertextuality, re-writing, and adaptation?

I will investigate intertextual strategies of re-writing Chekhov—that turn the author into a fictional figure—as performative and symbolic gestures. I will argue that the strategy of shifting the concept of author form historical to fictional figure, from artistic predecessor to artistic material, is based on the process of theatricalisation. Exploring the symbol performativity of Chekhov as a fictional figure, the paper will examine the role of theatricality within the intertextual dialogue, as well as, the tensions between death and transcendence of the author in the process of re-writing and adaptation.

Silvija Jestrovic is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick (UK) and a playwright. Her books include Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology (University of Toronto Press, 2006), Performance, Exile, ‘America’ (Palgrave Mcmillan 2009) co-edited with Yana Meerzon, and Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile (Palgrave 2012).

76 Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

Jozefina Komporaly Adaptation as Radical Re-telling: Multiplicity, Spectatorship, Experience

This paper explores stage adaptations as active interventions on a pre-existing text, and suggests that they belong to a welcome category of multiplicities defined by various forms of re-contextualisation, re-formulation and re-use. Radical re- telling is a particularly potent artistic strategy, perceived in this instance as a pathway for reacting to current concerns and resonating with historical and cultural change. Thus, the paper claims that adaptation is closely intertwined with bold artistic and political agendas of the contemporary context, and radical re-tellings can constitute instances of innovative and risk-taking theatre practice.

The paper dwells on situations where the adaptive process centres on re- contextualisation to incorporate a strong visual dramaturgy, and privileges active audience involvement. Such instances of performance invite an ‘emancipated spectator’, to use Rancière’s term, and transform stage adaptation into an experiential reinvention, which can have equal appeal to those familiar with and indeed novice to, the hypo-text on which the adaptation is based. Restructuring elements of the source text and interlacing it with live music and Brazilian rhythms, Zecora Ura’s production of Hotel Medea (2010) updates Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy to the present and makes all spectators directly partake in the performance. Starting at midnight and finishing at dawn, the production taps into the rhythm of nature to test audience endurance and to defamiliarize the conventions of standard theatre-going. Spectators are left to discover dramatic action on an individual and chance basis, being subject to the fluidity of performance, experience and interpretation.

Jozefina Komporaly is senior lecturer in drama at De Montfort University. She researches contemporary European and British theatre; translation and adaptation for the stage; directing and dramaturgy; interculturalism; women’s writing. Her publications include Staging Motherhood: British Women Playwrights, 1956 to the Present (Palgrave, 2006) and articles in various edited collections and academic journals. Jozefina is editor and co-translator of the first English-language anthology of Matei Visniec plays, entitled Matei Visniec: How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays (forthcoming, Seagull Books, 2015). She is currently preparing a monograph on radical revivals as adaptation for Palgrave.

77 Sarah Passfield Re-Bourne - a classical princess awakes in a 21st century gothic fairytale Matthew Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty”; a dance theatre triumph!

This paper discusses Matthew Bourne’s 2012 dance theatre adaptation of Marius Petipa’s 1898 classical ballet “Sleeping Beauty”. I will explore the re- working of the narrative structure and plot and also discuss in detail Bourne’s radically different characterisation of the Princess Aurora, including newly invented characters. Following on from gender transformations in his “Swan Lake” (1995), Bourne alters the gender of the key protagonist the Lilac Fairy, who becomes Count Lilac, leading the battle of good versus evil and finally defeating the vampire Cardoc.

Placing Bourne’s work in the context of late 20th century/21st century dance theatre, I will discuss how Bourne’s movement material, his choreographic ‘language’, is so effective in communicating his re-shaped story and how the audience engages empathically with his characters. Bourne uses puppetry to allow his baby Princess Aurora to participate in Act One, where she traditionally is asleep in her crib. In Bourne’s version, this baby Princess wreaks havoc throughout the palace as she climbs the curtains and defies her royal staff to delightful comic effect. She leads the spectators closer to the action on stage as she watches Count Lilac and the fairies bestow Christening gifts of magic charms. The spectators empathise perhaps most closely with her even though she is a puppet, and we share her reactions to the events on stage.

I draw upon a theoretical framework of affect, entrainment, affordance and kinaesthetic empathy to develop my discussion on the spectator experience, audience engagement and affective dramaturgy of Bourne’s adaptation.

Sarah Passfield returns to academia after working as a dancer, animateur and teacher. She trained in Cecchetti classical ballet and then for three years at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in the 1980s. Subsequently, she worked in and around London, Suffolk and the South East with several independent dancers and choreographers in emerging companies. She studied Dance History, Choreography and Analysis towards an MA at the University of Surrey and supported Yolande Snaith and Rosemary Butcher in creating new commissioned works. Currently she is a PhD student at the University of Kent, researching Affective Dramaturgy and Spectatorship in Dance Theatre.

78 Benjamin Poore Pygmalion and Adaptation: A Matter of Life and Death

In an essay on adaptation, Brett Westbrook recently asked which, of all the ‘texts’ (filmic, scripted, musical, mythical) named Pygmalion, is the pre-cursor text, the original (2010: 28)? In this paper, I’d like to consider the relationship between the Pygmalion myth, Bernard Shaw’s 1914 play and Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 stage musical My Fair Lady, and what, together, they tell us about adaptation, authorship, re-telling, modernisation and intertextuality.

Shaw adapted Ovid’s erotic tale in the Metamorphoses into a modern story of privilege and performance, giving voice to Ovid’s silent statue. Lerner and Loewe, writing the musical after Shaw’s death and with a range of alternative endings by the playwright to choose from, united Higgins and Eliza at the musical’s end, in what was now a historical drama with a modern Broadway score. Which of these two is the more radical adaptation? Thomas Leitch categorises My Fair Lady as a ‘correction’ of the source text (2007: 100), but it might further be argued that their version of the Pygmalion myth is more in keeping with Ovid, with Shaw’s as the obtuse interpretation.

Not only did Shaw rewrite the ending of his Pygmalion several times, but he also attempted to control reception and interpretation of the play through its Preface and Sequel. Ironically, given Shaw’s iron control of rehearsals in his lifetime, his play’s variant endings force each director of a revival to make a dramaturgical intervention and choose (or devise) a version of the ending.

Benjamin Poore is Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, University of York. His publications include Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre: Staging the Victorians (Palgrave, 2012) and numerous articles and chapters on stage and screen adaptation, neo-Victorianism, costume drama, nostalgia, and villainy. He is currently working on a short book on the relationship between theatre and empire.

Working Groups Session 4 Friday 5th September 10.00-11.30am

Business Meeting

79 Documenting Performance Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

James Burrows Lines of Flight: Exploring the Florilegium – A Memetic application for the curation of Digital/Live Performance Networks

This paper will explore the Florilegium web application currently being developed as part of Burrows’ funded doctoral Practice-as-Research project at Edge Hill University. The project examines the potential of insights drawn from memetic science, to the genesis and curation of live and digital artworks, and synchronic collaborative performance networks. The primary objective of this venture was to generate new insights on the practical mechanisms of (re)combinational creativity, through the process of engendering a ‘distributed memetic artwork’ (Burrows. 2014). The resulting artwork/web based application (Florilegium) is unique; acting as both a non-hierarchical, ever modifiable archive of ephemera and acentered map of live performance events from Burrows & further contributing artists. Distinctively, the archived elements of documentation are presented spatially across both digital and physical domains, as an expression of their memetic linkage back to the original performance catalyst (a collaborative transmedial narrative generated via user interaction with social media platforms Facebook & Twitter). As an outcome of examining the epistemological qualities of memetic curation methods through the outlined practice, this paper will also explore two critical terminologies. Original to this project, they will be interrogated in relation to their possible future, and wider application to the field of performance studies.

James Burrows is a funded doctoral candidate and associate lecturer with the Department of Performing Arts at Edge Hill University. He is due to submit his thesis: ‘Florilegium; A Memetic Application for the Curation of Digital/Live Performance Networks’ in 2015. As an early career researcher, James is dedicated to establishing a progressive academic career. James’ principal teaching and research interests are aligned with the study of contemporary performance practice, and the intersections between science, technology and digital media. He has presented at both national (TaPRA, York St. Johns University) and international (ISIS, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania) conference events in 2013. 80 Karen Quigley Documented struggles: site-specific practice in Chester city centre

Building on Michel de Certeau’s discussion of space as ‘practiced place’, this short paper ventures the notion that, through facilitating a site-specific performance module for undergraduate students, and through my own site- specific performance practice in the same site, the space of Chester city centre arguably becomes a palimpsestic, ‘twice-practiced place’ for me. This analytical approach may seem to artificially still the flux of the multiple and complex occupations, narratives and identities of urban spaces, but I proceed in this way in order to illuminate emerging comparisons and contrasts between pedagogical and solo approaches to my site-specific practices, particularly in the area of documentation. In my own site-specific work, deliberate choices about documentation (and, frequently, strategies of non-documentation) inform the practice in terms of structure, content and spectatorship. Conversely, when I am teaching, the pedagogic value of documentation in relation to site- specific practice is significant, allowing students to develop and analyse their own work via its visual and textual recall (among other methodologies). My paper will articulate some of these correspondences, and will argue that the documentation of pedagogical and solo performance practices in a site-specific context results in a complex practicing of the site. Mingling the personal and professional selves, and placing the learning outcomes of a module alongside a performance practice that in many ways deviates from such a structure, I locate this multiplicity in a single, palimpsestic site which arguably becomes a co-facilitator of these various attempts to document pedagogy and practice. Drawing on Cathy Turner, Mike Pearson and Nick Kaye’s writings in this area, the occupation of the space by me as a solo performer, and by me as a teacher with my students, results in a series of questions about documentation from historical, geographical and narrative perspectives.

Karen Quigley is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Chester. Her doctoral research at King’s College London explored moments of unstageability in modern European theatre. Her new research into site-specific work continues to be influenced by her performance and teaching practices in Chester.

Joseph Dunne Reimagining the future cityscape: how the digital archive can shatter the Olympic Dream

It has been two years since the spectacle of the 2012 Olympic Games ended; the old industrial site in Stratford, East London, has been regenerated into the 81 Olympic Village, comprising the E20 Village, the Westfield Shopping Centre and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The Olympic Village reveals what the political classes consider to be an ‘ideal’ cityscape: cities made up of intensely monitored housing estates built around retail complexes. How, then, will the history of East London be remembered in the context of the Olympic Legacy? In this paper I explore what effect(s) regeneration projects have on a community’s memory of place. Using my audio walk Voices from the Village (www.voicesfromthevillage. co.uk) as an example, I argue that documentation practices can engender mediated forms of interactivity for participants during a live performance. By documenting their walk and uploading the resultant material onto the Voices from the Village website, I am exploring how a participatory mode of performance can operate as a process of archival production. By this, I mean that the documents participants create allow visitors to the website to interpret the Olympic Village outside of the regeneration narrative. I link this with theories pertaining to the archive’s generative potential, where archival documents are not read as material which creates a totalising, ‘complete’ narrative of the past, but is instead understood as material which allows for potentially limitless versions of the past to emerge as a series of subjective interpretations. By re-sequencing the documents produced in Voices from the Village, the ubiquitous narrative of the Olympic Legacy can be re-written by participants in order to imagine alternative future cityscapes.

Joseph Dunne is a performance practitioner and PhD researcher at the University of Lincoln. His PhD Regenerating the live: the archive as the genesis of a performance practice examines how documentation strategies and practices can engender participatory modes of spectatorship. His research interests lie in using the philosophy underpinning the archive to inform site-based performance practice, particularly in sites undergoing urban regeneration.

Georgina Guy Making Visible: Paul Klee and the Museum without Dust

Building on my current research which explores questions of documenting performance in relation to contexts of collection, exhibition and curation, this presentation will address the problems, potentials and failures of performance and its documents by thinking through the recent exhibition Paul Klee: Making Visible (Tate Modern, London 2013 - 2014). In 1911, Klee began to keep a record of all of his works. In 2013, Tate Modern curated an exhibition by following Klee’s own system of documentation so that his paintings were displayed according to the number assigned to them within the artist’s own catalogue.

82 ‘Klee’s meticulous systems of recording and cataloguing have allowed us to bring together paintings that he made alongside one another in the studio, and to recapture the choices he made in forming his own exhibitions’ (Tate). Klee’s interest in documenting his practice raises questions about the influence an artist might have on the posthumous presentation of their work and prompts relations between objects which may not otherwise be imagined. In this way, the exhibition contributes to discussions about documents as source materials for new work, since Klee’s methods come to inflect contemporary curatorial practice.

Klee’s work centres on technical experiment, on home-made systems for tracing and reproduction, on representing movement, and on the relationship between construction and research - all key issues for documenting performance. In addition, his Pedagogical Sketchbook thinks through the relationship between point and line, giving Klee’s work a digital connection and drawing focus to the relation between making, documenting and critical reflection. In this paper, I will use Klee as a case study for thinking documentation as part of the creative process and about how performance might occupy a space like that in which surrealist René Crevel locates Klee’s practice: in the ‘only museum without dust.’

Georgina Guy is a Lecturer in Theatre & Performance Studies at King’s College London where her teaching includes a research-led module on ‘Collecting Performance’. Her research centres on the exhibition as a dynamic context in which established traditions of display and performance interact. Closely related to the cultural forces of the day, her current book project, Displayed & Performed, articulates an emerging field of arts practice distinct from but related to growing curatorial provision for ‘live’ performance. This work focusses on how performance is documented, presented, curated, and otherwise attended to within institutions of contemporary art and visual culture.

Ollie Evans What can’t be coded can be decorded: Performing James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake through Textual Genetics

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is similarly entangled in the warp and weft of memory and forgetting. This presentation weaves together Joyce’s attempt to ‘redismember’ the cycles of human history with the history of the book’s own 17 year long composition process. The Genetic study of documents in Joyce’s archive often entails (as Joseph Roach describes ritualistic performance) ‘the doomed search for lost originals’ when a genetic scholar attempts to encounter

83 and re-enact the originary events and contingencies that took place during the text’s composition. I treat these as archival performances, from embodied experiences of working with its documents to lectures and conference papers. These performances can be viewed as enactments of Finnegans Wake’s transmutational ‘reminiscence’ of its own ‘original document’, attempting to re- encounter ‘originals’ through its failures, lapses and modes of forgetting. This presentation will be a living, ‘fleshy kind of document’, a performance I have been making about a half-forgotten, silenced actor in Finnegans Wake’s composition process: Mme France Raphael, Joyce’s amanuensis. Raphael transcribed many of his notes and, in the process, made errors that were incorporated into the final publication of the book. The performance recounts my visit to the Joyce archive in Buffalo and my attempt, as a performer-scholar, to encounter the spectral presence of Raphael in the archive and reflect upon the gendered and economic power relations that were contained in her performance as Joyce’s amanuensis. Through an interplay of recorded and live material (fil, speech and gesture), this presentation will explore the notion in Finnegans Wake that if an historical certainty ‘can’t be coded’ then it might at least be ‘decorded’: a recording or a decoding that unravels in performance and which, like the ‘cord’ in ‘record’, comes ‘by the heart’ and attempts to make a connection amongst the specters in these documents through the embodied experience of archival research.

Ollie Evans is undertaking an AHRC funded, part-practice based PhD on ‘Performance and Finnegans Wake’ at Birkbeck College. From 2008-11 he directed and performed in the group Dummy Company, pursuing a combination of puppetry, object theatre, sound-art, language games and experimental ventriloquism. Recent projects and collaborations include working with Guildhall School of Music as part of the Voiceworks project at the Wigmore Hall; presenting performance work at events such as Camaradefest (Richmix), VOX Symposium (Birkbeck), Polyply (Royal Holloway), Starcrusher (Cambridge University) and Surrey Poetry Festival 2014 and at MACBA Barcelona. Recent publications include, as editor, James Joyce, The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (Contraband 2014) and as a poet, Kettles (Veer, 2013), High-Digger (Stoma, 2013), The Chomedy (Red Ceilings, 2013), Dash Booked a Builder (Red Ceilings, 2012) and Stutter Studies (Department, 2011).

84 Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Sophie Johns Collector, object, researcher: Re-materialising interaction with physical artefacts in The Bristol University Theatre Collection

From the moment of accession to the archive, collections become a researcher’s location of encounter with the personal, lived experiences in theatre and performance past. The object comes tobe the collector and the collector to be the object, both are reciprocal storytellers and the researcher in the relationship has the potential to form a triangulation of history dissemination. Bearing in mind arguments for and against the legitimacy of a subjective or anecdotal history, it is important now that we find a methodology that utilises the individual perspective and circumstance in historical research as it can offer a disruptive yet diversifying avenue for the further critical analysis of performance documentation. The tripartite study model of collector – object - researcher within the time and space of the archive, encourages an immediate and simultaneous personal comprehension of text, object, body and context; an approach that seems a most valuable phenomenological legacy afforded historians by the academic consciousness at the forefront of theatre and performance research. This simple appeal to the subjective narrative in performance documentation research may be an answer to attracting inclusive access to collections, generating new and diverse histories via object based learning with three dimensional and tangible documents. By way of helping to explore questions of the ‘historically uncomfortable dialectic’ of performance documentation, this paper will discuss forgotten or marginalised perspectives of the past that have emerged in my thesis studies in the Bristol Theatre Collection from which we can investigate the root of the proposed methodology: personal agenda. A variation of case studies will act as overarching analogies for the potential of performance documentation in theatre archive collections to generate momentum for cross- disciplinary theories and concepts through personal responses to objects.

Sophie Johns is a Postgraduate Researcher at Bristol University Drama Department currently completing my Phd based in the Bristol University Theatre Collection. I am particularly interested in philosophies of history and knowledge with regard to performance and theatre documentation and archive collections. My thesis combines an MA English and MA Performance Research to explore history and documentation within the specificity of my case study in the archive.

85 Pema Clark Performing Sand: A Case for the Abandonment of Video Documentation in Buddhist Inspired Live Art

Documenting performance in the context of practice-based research has become the standard protocol for the assessment of live work as permanent document and archive. In contrast, the practice of Buddhism recognizes impermanence as the central doctrine governing all aspects of life. What happens when these two fields are combined? In my paper, ‘Performing Sand: A Case for the Abandonment of Video Documentation in Buddhist Inspired Live Art’, I will address the dialectic inherent in documenting a field of performance art that relies on its doctrinal foundations to convey principles that video documentation renders redundant. In order to further my argument, I offer alternative methods of documentation as part of the creative process that keep the work ‘live’ in the mind of the audience upon every subsequent engagement with the material. Far from being a failure to document, Buddhist live art demands a new way of approaching the documentation of performance in the academy.

Pema Clark trained in performance at Guildford School of Acting (class of 1992). I received a first-class honours degree in theatre from The University of Surrey in 2011 and an MA Theatre Directing from UEA in 2013. My PaR PhD, also at UEA, is Self and No Self: Buddhist Influences in Contemporary Performance. Solo work includes At Sea: 1980 – 2010 (Generative Constraints conference and Norwich Arts Centre); After Ai (photo project) and No(h) Father (UEA and IFTR Conference July 2014). Upcoming performances include whispers at the Goldsmiths Graduate Festival and Still Life at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich.

Joanna Linsley Documenting Voice, Reproducing Authenticity

From the battle to displace the phenomenological/ontological primacy of the visual (e.g. Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘anti-ocular turn’) to attempts in psychoanlysis to redirect Lacan’s gaze (e.g. Bracha Ettinger or Mladen Dolar), the voice is a fresh field for re-thinking both being and experience, and developing new political responses. Key to much of this philosophical work on the voice are questions of authenticity and singularity – for instance, Adriana Cavarero’s uniqueness of vocal expression which is also necessarily a complex being-in-communion with others. This paper suggests that the voice as a tool for thinking about authenticity and singularity might be useful for work in performance studies around documentation and the traces of performance. Works like Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains show how performance is neither a stable,

86 enduring object nor a neatly vanishing event, but rather remains in complex and ever-shifting modes. Performance documentation is thus a volatile and significant place for questioning authoritative histories and destabilizing fixed identities and hierarchies of knowledge. In this paper, I argue that the remains of the voice are particularly tricky and valuable materials for this work. This paper focuses specifically on the video and performance work of ASM Kobayashi, a young New York-based artist. Her work uses found documents to restage both intimate and banal encounters between ‘real’ people. Drawing particularly on her extensive collection of audio tapes found in secondhand answering machines, Kobayashi’s work pairs the seemingly ‘authentic’ voices of strangers with elaborately acted-out visual re-enactments. In so doing, Kobayashi reveals both the fluidity of singular identity, and the labour that goes into the reverberation of authenticity.

Johanna Linsley is an artist, researcher and producer. Her work has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and Dance Theatre Journal, and she has a chapter on eavesdropping as performance documentation in Voice Studies, forthcoming from Routledge in 2015. For the past three years she has worked on the AHRC-funded project Performing Documents, and she is currently co-editing a book arising from the project. She is an Associate of the Pacitti Company’s Think Tank in Ipswich, and she is part of the London-based live art producing team I’m With You. She is a co-founder of UnionDocs, a centre for documentary arts in New York. www.jhlinsley.com

Marc Silberschatz Whose research is it anyway? Challenges in documenting practice-led research in theatre directing

My completed PhD research used the theory surrounding flow (the psychological state associated with ‘being in the zone’) to interrogate identification-oriented rehearsal and performance practice from my position as a theatre director / researcher. This interrogation led to practice-led research that attempted to develop contributions to rehearsal and performance practice that minimised pre-agreed-upon performance structure and divided consciousness, which were hypothesized as the two greatest impediments to flow in performance. Approaching this research as a theatre director rather than as a performer raised (and continues to raise) several questions: whose practice is actually being researched,: mine, the actor’s, or both? Can directorial practice lead this research? What documentation is required? What is being documented: process, performance, both or neither? And most significantly, how can this practice-led research be documented to include multiple perspectives and 87 subjectivities while maintaining the necessary degree of rigour? This presentation begins by outlining the methodological framework underpinning the research - a synthesis of action research, reflective practice and directorial practice. Using the this framework, I will present the research-specific questions that documentation needed to address in this research and demonstrate how these questions were answered through a triangulated documentation process that included approaches to video documentation featuring radical editing of performance fragments for the purposes of analysis alongside more traditional qualitative and quantitative research methods such as interviews and survey analysis. The result, I will argue, is an approach to documentation that recognises the inherent inability to capture rehearsal and performance process objectively, advocating instead for an approach that pushes against the performed object of documentation from a variety of angles, narrowing its possibility space to something that may be rigorously analysed.

Marc Silberschatz recently completed his PhD - Inter-Actor Interaction: Contributions to Rehearsal and Performance Practice that Attempt to Minimize Pre-Agreed-Upon Performance Structure and Divided Consciousness - at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the University of St Andrews. His was these institutions’ first practice-led drama PhD. He is also a professional theatre director whose work has been staged in both the United States and United Kingdom.

Panel Sessions 1 Thursday 4th September 11.30-1.00pm

Wikipedia Editing Workshop led by Toni Sant

This workshop will provide an introduction to writing/editing articles on Wikipedia, as well as basic training on working with other Wikimedia projects. TaPRA has been collaborating with Wikimedia UK to offer its members basic training in editing Wikipedia. Two workshops were held in London and Glasgow earlier this year. This workshop is also intended as a follow up opportunity for people who attended either of those sessions and want to explore further possibilities with theatre and performance articles on the world’s most read online encyclopedia. During this session, there will also be an opportunity to explore the use of Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool in theatre and performance, particularly in relation to developing critical thinking skills and alternative assessment models in higher education within the context of open online resources. Further details available at http://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/TaPRA_Conference_2014

88 Toni Sant is the Education Organiser for Wikimedia UK, actively supporting the use of Wikipedia and related projects in educational settings. He is also Reader in Digital Curation at the University of Hull’s School of Arts & New Media, as well as the author of Franklin Furnace & the Spirit of the Avant Garde: A History of the Future (Intellect, 2011). Toni recently guest edited a special issue of the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Documenting Performance (Vol 10, No 1). He is currently working on a new book called Documenting Performance: On the Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving (forthcoming from Bloomsbury-Methuen, 2016). See also http://www.tonisant.com

Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

Laura Molloy Documentation is just the beginning: digital curation practice in the UK performing arts community

As a researcher in the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow, I work in an interdisciplinary team of research project staff concerned with digital curation, digital preservation, data management and digital humanities. Much of what we do aims to improve the creation and management of digital assets in the research environment of universities and other cultural heritage organisations, cutting across institutions and disciplines. I am currently engaged in working on an MPhil (Res) which is concerned with whether and how performing arts practitioners manage their digital assets in a way which – at least in the context of digital curation – appears to be sustainable, and supports access to those assets for researchers, artists and the public of current and future generations. I have been able to periodically reiterate my progress to the working group throughout the data-gathering period of this study, and expand on the relationship between the performer and the archive, including not only if and how performers create contributions to the archive, but also why they might choose not to, and how they find the archived documentation of the work of other performers, thus completing the cycle of activity and influence between the performer and the archived document. For this presentation, I would like to show how the priorities of digital curation and the performing arts collide in this research project, and how the benefits of digital curation practice can be of benefit to the performing arts community, both within and beyond the academy.

89 Laura Molloy is a digital curation researcher, currently working for the Digital Curation Centre and based at Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. She has previously led training and advocacy efforts across UK and EU funded digital curation and preservation initiatives, and is particularly interested in digital curation and research data management awareness and skills development across disciplines including those beyond the sciences. Her current MPhil thesis addresses what happens in the space where digital curation and performing arts practice overlap. She tweets at LM_ HATII.

Allan Taylor The performative photograph: how the still image ‘does’

In Auslander’s paper (2006) on the performativity of photography, Auslander suggests that is possible for the photographic document to perform and yet does not fully place ‘the performative’ within the context of the word’s disseminated academic history. In fact, it could be read in this paper that the word ‘performative’ to mean ‘performance-like’ instead of using it in the original context set out by J L Austin (1971) to mean ‘a speech act’ or ‘an utterance that enacts something’. If we are to describe something as performative, what we are saying is that it is a linguistic construct, and this is problematic for live and visual artists since there is often an absence of visually or verbally available language in photographic documentation. In this paper, I will analogise performance as the ‘speech act’ and photography as its transcription, which is then cited on its visual reception by its audience. Using ideas from Austin, Derrida (1982) and Butler (1993), as well as work from Azoulay’s (2008) book ‘The Civil Contract of Photography’, I will place the performativity of the photograph within the historical context of the term and explains how the photograph asks its audience to encounter it as a co- temporal addressee – something that ‘does’ in the now it is viewed rather than something that ‘has been’ in the past, importing a sense of ‘the live’ into our encounter with the photograph. This paper also aims to show how one of live art’s previous problems with documentation – that it cannot encapsulate its break with the radical, or be considered to have liveness – can be revised if we see the photograph as ‘performative’ within this framework.

Allan Taylor is an artist and academic working across performance and photography. He is currently researching his PhD at Falmouth University entitled ‘Capturing performance: the performativity of the still image as enactment’, which looks at how photographic documents could be considered a form of performance

90 Yvonne Schmidt Free Republic Hora

In this paper I look at the creation of the long-term performance project Freie Republik Hora (Free Republic Hora) which uses video documentary as a creative method during the rehearsal process. Theater Hora is a Swiss theatre company of disabled performers, which became internationally famous for its work Disabled Theater, directed by the French choreographer Jérôme Bel (2012). Their current project Free Republic Hora uses the stage as a laboratory: The performers, professionally trained actors with cognitive disabilities, are working collaboratively without a director or choreographer over a three year period. The (video) documentary is part of the artistic concept: Public Try Outs and audience discussions, as well as periodical interviews with the performers and rehearsals are documented. The material serves as a resource during the artistic process. Only in a second stage, the material becomes a means of research. In what ways might video-based research enhance current understandings of rehearsals and creative processes in the performing arts? How is the relation between rehearsal and performance, offstage and onstage challenged, when the camera gives a second forum for the performers? The project is linked to a larger research project in progress on Dis/ability on Stage. Exploring Body Techniques in contemporary Performing Arts Practice at the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film, Zurich University of the Arts, in co-operation with the University of Basel, Institute of Cultural Studies and European Ethnology, the Scuola Teatro Dimitri in Verscio, and the Institute of Theater Studies, University of Bern.

Yvonne Schmidt, Dr. des. completed her PhD in Theatre Studies at the University of Bern and is a Research Associate at the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film of the Zurich University of the Arts. Currently, she is head of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) funded research project “Today’s Festival”. Her research explores performance and disability, Swiss theatre traditions and the intersections of acting theory and everyday performances. In 2012, she received a Research Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Program on Disability Art, Culture and Humanities. She is co-convenor of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR-FIRT) Working Group on Performance and Disability.

Pia Elisabeth Strickler Actor Training as an Example of Polycultural Switzerland

Actor Training as an Example of Polycultural Switzerland investigates the 91 professional actor training programs at four Swiss drama schools through ethnographic documentary. The research project focuses on visible characteristics of each training program and its relatedness to the cultural areas in and around Switzerland, determined by the different languages German, French and Italian. Over a period of 12 month the researcher visited actors’ training and made a documentation of the classes with 20 different teachers by using digital video. Here, videoethnography is used as a research method in order to investigate the actor training, to capture the unrepeatable and give an organic character to the transitoriness of these classes. Today a corpus of digital video is accessible for research analysis. In my presentation I will explore the benefits and the problems when working with this material in a research context. My focus lies on the question how video-based research might help to understand learning process in the performing arts.

Pia Elisabeth Strickler, Dr. phil. completed degrees in Theatre Studies, German Literature and Swiss Ethnology at the Universities of Bern (Switzerland) and Berlin (Germany). In 2010, she received her degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Bern (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation). Currently, she is head of the research project “Actor Training as an example of Polycultural Switzerland” at the Institution for the Performing Arts and Film / Zurich University of the Arts (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Federal Office of Culture). Her research interests are: perception of performances, transitoriness and documentation, education in acting, European theatre systems.

Working Groups Session 4 Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Business Meeting

92 Performance and New Technologies Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Andy Lavender Virtually Here (but still not quite yet): towards Internet Theatre

A number of theatre and performance companies have explored virtual connectivity between individuals in different geographical locations, using mobile and communications technologies. Internet-enabled performance has often been movement-based, where it involves performers/participants in interaction; or driven by visual animation, where it entails remote participation by different artists and designers. One of the main modes of theatre – the presentation of drama as drama – is largely missing from the ecosystem of Internet performance. It has proved difficult to embed a dependable system that allows for continuous real-time dramatic interaction between performers, and performers and spectators, with time-lag, spatial (dis)continuities and cueing challenges to the fore. A robust system for real-time dramatic presentation has yet to be demonstrated online, in a manner that entails uninterrupted spoken utterance between characters/personae; continuous interrelation of physical action and interaction; the presentation of an absorbing and sustained narrative in dramatic form; and the opportunity for spectator interaction with the drama in real time.

My paper explores challenges to Internet performance, and developments that build on emergent aesthetic and communications protocols. It considers in part a practice-research approach to Euripides’ play Hecabe. The project revisits the classical Greek model of a protagonist and two antagonists playing the other characters, with each actor in a different space, performing to camera to enable the mediation of the event as a gathered virtual representation. The tension between presence and absence, and time and space, is central to classical Greek tragedy; it is a key feature of digital culture. My paper considers Internet theatre in relation to developments in the areas of remote and virtual performance; spectator engagement; real-time screenings of theatre productions; human- computer Interaction; and experience design concerning real-time distributed communication.

93 Andy Lavender is Professor of Theatre & Performance and Head of the School of Arts at the University of Surrey. He is co-editor of Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes (Manchester University Press, 2010) and Mapping Intermediality in Performance (Amsterdam University Press, 2010); and artistic director of the theatre/performance company Lightwork.

Annet Dekker The ‘act’ of net art: Extending the performative act by looking at its circular behaviour

Die-hard open source coders along with circuit benders are scrambling through utterances of code, tracing dead links, building something from scattered parts, and trying out endless emulations, while piecing together different parts. This is the scenario of I.K.U. (2000), Shu Lea Cheang’s movie (which was cycled into U.K.I. (2009), a game and performance) depicting an Internet porn enterprise, GENOM Corp., which introduces orgasm-on-the-go for a mobile phone chip. Dumped into an e-trash environment, coders, twitterers, and networkers are forced to scavenge through techno-waste to collect old and forgotten human orgasm data. Like most sci-fi, Cheang’s scenarios are not too remote from some contemporary realities; most people working with code and software will recognise the complex orderings and scattered pieces that Cheang describes.

Whereas artists and museums are trying to preserve net artworks, the reality is that many are already unable to perform because of incomplete hard- and software. Although the dynamic, networked and processual behaviour associated with net art is acknowledged, comprehending the cultural specificity of software and code is often underestimated. In this paper I trace the function of circulation (Benjamin and LiPuma, 2002: 191-213 in net art and analyse how movement performs (Austin, 1962) by looking at the hyperlink, the interaction between code, programmer and context, and its distribution process. This makes the structures and dependencies in and of net art more visible. By following such circular processes, I argue that a network, or being networked, enables an artform, but is also a constitutive act. In the process, I’m analysing what the ‘act’ of net art is and how it enacts the act that it represents. An emphasis on circulation and exchange of code involved in the infrastructure of communication will reveal certain power structures, as well it will provide a partial solution to a more general challenge of conserving variable and processual artworks.

Annet Dekker is an independent researcher, curator and writer. She is interested in the influence of technology, science and popular culture on art and vice versa. Currently she is core tutor at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and Researcher Digital

94 Preservation at Tate, London. Previously she worked as web curator for SKOR, was programme manager at Virtueel Platform, head of exhibitions, education and artists-in-residence at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, and editor of several publications on digital art and issues of preservation. In 2008 she began a Ph.D. research at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University in London.

Nathan Walker Action Score Generator: Permutation, Performance and Writing Machines

Knives in Mouth Drop on Hand. Polythene on Body Mouth to Window. Trousers Over Wall Scribble Over People. Dust Into Show Shout Over Gallery. Ribbon With Nail Cut Like Bench. Whistle Into Ear Mouth On People. Sheet Over Shoes Repeat Behind Chair.

The ‘Action Score Generator’ is an online text-based artwork that writes and re-writes an infinite series of performance event scores. The source texts collect together previously performed actions by artist Nathan Walker between 2006 – 2013. The scores are arranged into poetic, six-word-length instructions, aligning performance objects, tasks, verbs, and spaces that are reorganised endlessly by a JavaScript code. The artwork produces the possibility for multiple kinds of performance from engaging in the instructed task, reading as performance, to viewer as performer. The ASG aligns itself with the short poetic texts of Fluxus Event Scores and with rhythms of computational data, screen entries and time- based visual poetry.

I will investigate the poetics and performance of the event score through the use of computational writing. This practice of digital performance writing, whilst refereed to in the context of ‘new media’ does in fact date back to the 1950’s. Notably, the first random text computer generator was Christopher Strachey’s ‘Love Letter Generator’ (1952), a computer program that generated letters through a combinatorial system. The generator is the first known experiment in digital literature. This harnessing of systematic indeterminacy in the ASG begins with George Brecht’s Event Scores and moves to, for example, Merce Cunningham’s use of the computer programme ‘BodyForms’. I will consider how this digital process of permutational writing can be explored in the context of Dick Higgin’s term ‘intermedia’. The Action Score Generator can be viewed at: www.nathan-walker.co.uk/actionscoregenerator

Nathan Walker’s work transforms the event of writing into performance, sound, video and text. These interconnected forms assemble found and constructed language 95 experiments using poetic explorations of indeterminacy, syntax, notation, scores & the paragrammatic. He holds an MA in Performance Writing from Dartington College of Art and has presented performances and artworks nationally and internationally. His current research explores the performance of sound poetry, and the use of digital and online technologies in experimental writing practices. Alongside Victoria Gray he is co-director of O U I Performance, an artistic and curatorial collaboration based in Yorkshire. He is Senior Lecturer in Performance at York St John University, UK.

Irene Liverani The Participatory Collection-Installation: introducing an entity in performance and installation art

In this paper I introduce the concept of the ‘Participatory Collection- Installation’ as a relevant entity in contemporary installation and performance art. I propose the ‘Participatory Collection-Installation’ as an artwork that collects contributions from different people in response to a shared rule. The artist who produces such an artwork takes up the role of the procedural author (Murray 1998), and like the designer of a game, she sets up the rule that brings the contributions together, making the process unfold.

Through the examples of Buran and Sovrani’s installationMagic Cooke (2013), Murrillo’s installation Frequencies Project (2014), Dias’ performance Visita Guiada (2005), Hollander’s photographic installation Are you really my friend (2011), the paper considers the Participatory Collection-Installation as a principle of organization of elements. Actor-Network Theory and Sloterdijk’s metaphor of foam as a system of co-isolation (2006) facilitate an examination of the systemic aspect of the Participatory Collection-Installation, and enable me to describe such entity as a relational and compositional system.

I propose the way elements are organized in a Participatory Collection- Installation is tightly connected to the technologies that have marked the life span of today’s generation of young artists. Namely, a Participatory Collection- Installation is rooted in the simultaneous juxtaposition of stimuli that mass media have accustomed us to from the Eighties onward. At the same time it is soaked in the rhizomatic universe of digital technologies, and builts on the opportunities it offers. The paper will ultimately suggest that in a Participatory Collection-Installation the features of these technologies are made object of an act of productive consumption (De Certeau, 1984): extrapolatedfrom their context of origin, they might possibly challenge those very contexts, putting notions of event, historical account, and subjectivity at stake.

96 Irene Liverani is a second year PhD student at the Drama, Theatre and Performance Department, University of Roehampton. Her practice-led research focuses on the production and reflection of Participatory Collection-Installations, and connects such artworks with ideas of historical account, event, and subjectivity. She is currently collaborating with sound artist Alessio Mezzarobba at the production of sound installation Italians_2001. Together with company laPeriferia, Irene co-curated Schiume a performance festival taking place yearly in the Venetian mainland.

Giuliana Fenech Ecologies of Play: Emergent Participation and Performance

The demand for performance is pervasive and participatory. We are expected to perform professionally, culturally and technologically beyond the remit of theatre and the boundaries of the stage, in a society that is connected and networked to unprecedented levels. In an age of neoliberal backlash against the emancipatory advent of the computer and the Internet, it is tempting to claim that the nature of our performance in all spheres of communication, including art and culture, seems inscribed so that all we are left with is tactical (meaning reactive and subversive) forms of interpretation and creativity. Yet, I argue in this paper, the political, economic and aesthetic systems of society are, once more, reconfiguring themselves through the emergence of play ecologies.

Studying the trends of convergence culture and digital interactivity, this paper will explore play ecologies as they permeate contemporary public spheres and their performances. Performance, like play, demands a metacommunicative stance that allows for new intersubjective socio-technological opportunities to emerge. Drawing on the work of Roger Callois, Brenda Laurel, Bernard Koven, Mary Flanagan and Celia Pearce, I explore the term play ecologies through an analysis of mixed-reality performances; encounters that take place within real and virtual storyworlds that are both transmedial and networked. I argue that these storyworlds may be seen to replace traditional forms of the artistic public sphere and serve to renegotiate the parameters of private and public interaction, points of connection and notions of ownership and mobilisation. As community and art become networked and participatory they also facilitate and encourage a more emergent (meaning random and rhizomatic) type of participation in art, culture and society. The discourse of the artistic public sphere is therefore determined by that of networked publics holding within them the capacity for performance designs that are more akin to play communities influenced by new technologies.

Giuliana Fenech is Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Malta. 97 Her research specialisations and teaching portfolio range from cultural studies to digital media, with a particular interest in play and performance, digital technology and transmedia storytelling. She has just submitted a PhD in new media and children’s literature to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, with a focus on interactivity, immersion, convergence, participation and the notion of the networked public. She is also currently working on a monograph that examines the performative dimensions of the literary experience and argues that these have become akin to processes present in play communities.

Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Rosie Klich Amplifying Perception: The In and Out-puts of Headphone Theatre

Headphone theatre stimulates the interaction of media modalities and multimodal perception, and as such, is in an interesting position to explore and challenge the politics of perception. Addressing the relationship of the visual and the aural and the potential subversion of the hierarchy of the senses, this paper will examine the ways in which headphones manipulate relationships between what is seen (or not) and what is heard. Cognitive science and phenomenology will be used to analyse the ways in which headphone theatre creates slippages in our perception and triggers multimodal effects (the ‘ventriloquist effect’, the ‘McGurk effect’). Examples of headphone theatre will be explored, with particular focus on David Rosenberg’s The Roof and Ring, and discussion will consider the theatricalisation and mediatisation of sensory spaces. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of ‘auditory space’, this paper will further address how headphone theatre emphasizes “synaesthesia and wholeness” and activates haptic perception. Headphone theatre creates various dimensions of auditory space that surround, and resonate within, the body of the listener, inevitably complicating their role as perceiver and participant. Finally, the experience of the listener as being in a shared performance space will be explored: headphones both isolate and connect.

Rosemary Klich is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. She has published in the areas of spectatorship and participation, intermedial performance, and immersive theatre and her teaching focuses on contemporary performance practices and performance art. Her co-authored book Multimedia Performance was published at the beginning of 2012 and she is a long-standing

98 member of the Intermediality Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.

Maria Oshodi, Adam Spiers and Janet van der Linden Exploring haptics for novel sensory dramatic experiences: New Perspectives on accessibility in performance

Flatland is a collaborative research project led by three partners. Together we combine an artistic, technology and research approach to continue our investigations into accessibility, haptics and performance. Our conference contribution will be a presentation reviewing the initial stage of our investigation in this field and our current developments in a second stage of research.

We will describe the research, working methods, and results from our initial project The Question (2010). This was an attempt to create a more authentic experience of theatre from a visually impaired perspective, redirecting the action away from conventional mediators of spectacle. An audio design and tactile set was created within a pitch dark installation, aiming to relocate the action of the drama within the bodily experience of each audience member, who used a hand held haptic device to navigate themselves through the environment.

We developed the Haptic Lotus - an enactive, minimal, sensory substitution system enabling audience members to perceive, via novel and minimal tactile sensation, their proximity to narrative parts of the environment. We will discuss the design process of this unique system and the team’s challenge of designing for both technical functionality and dramatic effect.

Our current project, Flatland (funded by NESTA) involves the further development of the Haptic Lotus as a more advanced portable device. The Haptic Lotus used the location of audience members, in a similar way to GPS, to provide navigational cues. In the new installation we will implement a localisation system that has easier installation, greater reliability and higher resolution, allowing us greater freedom to link the haptic device feedback to narrative flow and events.

We describe the significance of our work in re-mapping performance practice and audience democratisation, and how we take the meaning of digital and performance, broadening it to include sensory modalities other than vision.

Extant is Britain’s only professional performing arts company of visually impaired artists founded in 1997. Extant’s value and strength is our drive to innovate. 99 Starting from a unique artistic perspective, the company develops ideas with a unique commitment to the inclusion of visually impaired artists and audiences utilising imaginative collaborations with cross-artform and non-arts partners. Their work is boundary pushing, challenging perceptions and traditional methodologies. It invents new ways of presenting work in everything from traditional proscenium arch settings to outdoor arts and high tech installations.

Haunted pliers is the working name of Dr. Adam (Ad) Spiers, a haptics, robotics and creative technology specialist, currently based at Yale University. Ad has been developing haptic navigation technology since 2004 and has previously worked with the Flatland project partners to lead the design and development of the Haptic Lotus device and associated infrastructure in the 2010 project, The Question. Ad also has research experience in surgical tele-robotics, remote handling, medical simulators and human movement analysis and synthesis. He has also created various technology- based installations for UK music festivals.

Dr Janet van der Linden is Senior Lecturer and Director of Research in the department of Computing and Communications, at the Open University. With a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective on the design of innovative technologies she has many years of experience in technology research investigating user feedback, rapid prototyping and deployment in the wild for arts purposes. She has published widely on the development of wearable technologies that involve the sense of touch, and that people can make use of almost as if the technology augments their senses. She previously worked with Oshodi and Spiers on the Haptic Lotus.

Beverley Hood Eidolon – Phantasm and fidelity in the theatre

Medical training has been transformed in recent years by a suite of technological tools. As a result, Clinical Simulation Centres have become new sites for performance. The medical theatre becomes the stage, hosting scenarios scripted and directed by training staff and simulation computer programmes, high definition mannequins embodied with physical responses, such as voice, pulse, breath and tears, alongside medical professionals, become actors. One of the key aspirations of this simulated and technologically complex environment is psychological fidelity, which enables training participants to invest extraordinary conviction, and commitment to the simulated scenario at hand.

This paper presents the author’s creative research to date at the Scottish Centre for Simulation & Clinical Human Factors (SCSC), at the Royal Forth Valley Hospital, Larbert, Scotland. The SCSC is state-of the-art multi-professional

100 training facility (the only high fidelity simulation centre in Scotland), which undertakes simulation based medical education (SBME) and boasts a range of mid and high fidelity mannequins, accommodated within two multipurpose simulation suites. These areas can be transformed to represent virtually any clinical hospital location (theatre, ward etc.), creating a unique psychological experience. This paper presents progress to date investigating the potential of this unique setting, as a site for an intimate participatory live art project.

The SCSC’s three stage method of training: prep for training (within training rooms); simulation (within simulated clinical environment); followed by de- brief and evaluation (watching footage of simulation within training rooms), is proposed as a potential infrastructure for performance, intertwining medical staff, audience and professional actors/performers (all scrubbed up and robed), combining ‘scripted’ medical procedure scenarios, with experimental theatre techniques and technologies to mobilise audience engagement and participation. The paper explores the potential of the simulated body, experienced through live, participatory performance, to challenge and provoke our perception of the body, presence and psychological fidelity.

Beverley Hood is a media artist, researcher and lecturer. Her research practice studies the impact of technology on relationships, the body and human experience, through the creation of practice based projects and writing. She has undertaken numerous residencies with a range of international art. A longstanding research interest is live performance using technology and projects include Glitching, (2012) an interactive installation and performance project, developed in collaboration with dancers, composer and technologists. Beverley is currently working on participatory media art projects including Spatial Memories, a JISCTechDis funded project and a collaboration with the Scottish Centre for Simulation & Clinical Human Factors (SCSC), at the Royal Forth Valley Hospital, Larbert. She was Co-Investigator on Moving Targets, a £3million Scottish Funding Council project and is a member of the CIRCLE research network and the Arts, Health, Dementia & Technologies Group at the University of Edinburgh.

Kerry Francksen Fluid exchanges: Digital energies

This paper builds on a developing movement practice that explores intimate exchanges between real-time image processing technologies, acousmatic sound environments and movement. To date the author’s attempts have been to re- conceptualize the art of making movement within media-rich environments through a philosophical appreciation of Erin Manning’s concepts of a ‘sensing 101 body in movement’ and ‘relation’ (2007,2009,2013). Using Manning’s theories as a framework for rethinking the relationship between live and digital dancing, the author will discuss how the integration of digital media into choreographic practice can begin to shift our understanding of what it means to move across live and digital borders. This paper draws upon concepts of immersion, embodiment, audience engagement and sensuality that have been integral to a recent and evolving artistic collaboration between the author and composer/ sound artist.

Our engagement with, and use of, new technologies has proven central to configuring the embodied experiences of the dancer, which in turn shapes and re- transforms embodied and performative behaviour. Furthermore, central to our collaborative performance work is the experience of, theoretical accounts of, and aesthetic orientation towards relationships created between a live, performing body and digital image and sound generation. This paper foregrounds the dancer’s experience, which is drawn from the author’s own embodied practice of moving in media-rich environments, as a way to engage more critically with ‘perceptual processes’ (Vaas Rhee 2010), or as Manning discusses ‘the body (as) active potential, not tautology’ (2007:61).

Kerry Francksen is an active practitioner, choreographer, artist and senior lecturer in dance at De Montfort University, Leicester. She has been working as a professional practitioner since 1997, making interactive installation art, live performance and works for camera. Kerry’s work has been performed and screened nationally and internationally and she has successfully received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council as well as receiving independent commissions. Kerry holds a Masters in dance video installation and is currently researching for a PhD, which aims to investigate the interrelationship and potential synchronicity of live and mediated dance.

Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

Johannes Birringer Audible Choreographies: Movement Technologies and Retrogardism

In his current research activities and multimedia dance works, Johannes Birringer discovers a new desire to look back at earlier 20th century media and Futurist / Constructivist concepts of noise and abstraction. Although interest

102 in wearable or mobile technologies in today’s world of social networks is increasing, the performing arts rarely integrate body-worn technologies, appendages and customized equipments into their dramaturgies nor appreciate some of the findings by earlier experimenters at the start of the 20th century (Fuller, Schlemmer, Meyerhold, Tretyakov, Eisenstein, Malevich, Lissitzky). After some pioneering efforts in music and audio art, deepening our understanding of electro-acoustic and electronic sound processing as well as generative potentials of sound hardware/software and controllers (MIDI instruments), dance/ theatre practices have begun to rediscover performance design, which this author historicizes back to landmark constructivist and Bauhaus experiments in “sounding” choreographies and gestural languages that extend the theatre as an instrument (also remembering Antonin Artaud and early acousmatic sound artists). Briefly referring to recent choreographic installations by the DAP-Lab, Birringer will present his ideas on materiality, audible and inaudible choreography and voice, reflecting on notions of technology, gesture and touch in relation to body-connected technologies that function in resonant choreographic environments.

Johannes Birringer is a choreographer/media artist and co-director of DAP-Lab (http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap) at Brunel University where he is Professor of Performance Technologies. As artistic director of the Houston-based AlienNation Co. he has created dance-theatre works, installations & digital projects in Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan. DAP-Lab’s dancework Suna no Onna and the mixed- reality installation UKIYO were shown in Europe between 2007-10; the opera for the time being [Victory over the Sun]recently premiered at Sadlers Wells (2014). He is founding director of Interaktionslabor (http://interaktionslabor.de) and author of numerous books (e.g. Media and Performance; Performance, Technology and Science; Dance and Cognition).

Daniël Ploeger Towards Abject Digital Performance: Engaging the politics of electronic waste

A large part of European and North-American electronic waste is exported to China, India, and West-African countries, where it is often recycled through environmentally harmful methods or dumped in unprotected areas. Although this global stream of e-waste is only expected to grow further over the next decades, public debate on digital technologies in post-industrial societies has primarily focused on the economic and social benefits of technological innovation.

103 Digital performance arts practices have largely been complicit in this narrative. The field has long been dominated by work that explores and celebrates the technical and aesthetic possibilities of state of the art innovations (cf. Stelarc, Kevin Warwick, Troika Ranch). Although over the past decades an increasing number of artists have created work that seeks to critique the implications of the technologically determinist agenda of such work in terms of the politics of gender (cf. Tomie Hahn, Laetitia Sonami), social class and ethnicity (cf. Gómez-Peña), the scope of these critiques has mostly remained confined within the framework of western, post-industrial consumer culture: the work has not engaged with the global socio-material consequences of the economy of ever- increasing consumption of technological devices.

Building on anthropologist Mary Douglas’ (2002 [1966]) writing on the ritual function of dirt in culture, I propose a strategy in digital performance that unbalances prevalent ideologies of technology as immaterial and always new and ‘clean’. Conceptualizing e-waste as ‘abject technology’ – because of its position outside the symbolic order of post-industrial consumer culture – I seek to develop an ‘abject digital performance’ practice where obsolete electronic devices are connected to performers’ bodies in an endeavour to juxtapose and explore notions of the abject (Kristeva 1982) in relation to both consumer technology and the human (consumer) body. I will discuss my work Recycled Coil (2014) as an early example of this approach.

Dr Daniël Ploeger is an artist and theorist. His work involves consumer technologies and readily available medical devices, and explores themes around technologized bodies, ecology, sexuality and vanity. Dani’s artwork has been programmed throughout Europe, North-America and China, and his writing has been published in journals and books. Dani is Course Leader for Performance Arts at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He is also Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project “Bodies of Planned Obsolescence: Digital performance and the global politics of electronic waste”, which will include workshops, symposia and exhibitions in China, Nigeria and the UK during 2014-15.

Mari Thynne Interactive Theatre: Reconfiguring the value space

Creative Industries are key to both cultural and economic progress in an increasingly competitive world. Divisions of the arts and culture industries, including theatre, are the largest contributors to the industry’s collective turnover estimated £5.9 billion (Mowlah et al., 2014). Yet, little is known about the overall value of digital technology in theatre. There is a growing body of

104 research into audience perceptions and value on both sides of the Atlantic (i.e. Foreman-Wernet and Dervin, 2011; Alston, 2013). However, there are few inquiries into the Makers and their understanding of the value of digital technologies in theatre. I posit such an inquiry will open up interesting research horizons from the socio-economic value perspective – an important element when re-envisaging the field. There is a call for more in-depth qualitative research i.e. ‘a need in future economic impact studies to better capture the contribution of sole traders, freelancers… (Mowlah et al., 2014). This RCUK funded scoping study, undertaken May-July 2014, will address this qualitative call, theoretically assisting the debate by reflecting on current practice to inform future directions.

This cross-disciplinary work combines elements of organizational studies and theatre studies in a single case study (Yin, 2003) to identify how we might represent and account for societal as well as monetised values (Potts, 2011). More specifically, the work will recognize notions of materiality in the light of the latest technological developments used within theatre as ‘from the point of view of organizational phenomena, technology seems to be everywhere in the world of practice’ (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008). The work will answer ‘How, and to what extent, does digital technology affect value of interactive theatre today?’ Rich qualitative responses from ‘sensemaking’ narratives (Brown et al., 2008; Czarniawska-Joerges, 2004) of interactive theatre makers lead the scope for impact at both scholarly and practice levels.

Mari Thynne majored in Theatre at Dartington College of Arts. Trained as an actor, dramatist and artistic director in experimental theatre, she graduated in 1995 with BA (Hons) before founding Theatre of Red Earth in the south west of England. Working professionally in making and touring experimental theatre she returned to academic study in 2006 to complete a Master of Research Methods at the University of Bath. Mari’s research is now within the HighWire Doctoral Research Centre at Lancaster University. She is exploring identity, power and values within experimental theatre production and undertaking commissioned research projects. Lancaster University profile: http://highwire-web.lancs.ac.uk/People/Mari_Thynne/128

Elena Marchevschka Can You See Us Now? The politics of self-organised choir Raspeani Skopjani and their social media presence

This paper will present and analyse the work of the self-organized choir ‘Raspeani Skopjani’, who through their work try to produce a counteranalysis of the political history of Republic of Macedonia and the urban development of its capital Skopje, which has been for so long and still remains largely falsified. 105 The phenomenon of self-organized choirs emerging in the last five years in the former Yugoslavia is considered a paradigmatic example of a pro-active, autonomous and emancipatory approach to the Yugoslav past. “Raspeani skopjani” started as a spontaneous ( social media moderated) youth initiative in 2009, when the ultra conservative Macedonian government announced its grandeurs plans for “Skopje 2014” to change the capital’s central architecture. The Macedonian government’s practice of investing in the construction of huge public sculptures, monuments, religious landmarks etc without any public debate has had a significant impact on emergence of self organised anti-establishment youth initiative.

Mainly using the blogosphere and social media to communicate and discuss their ideas, “Raspeani Skopjani” also took their protest to the streets of Skopje and revealed their identities. By bringing their virtual self ’s as actual bodies on the street, they work hand in hand with Pollesch (2004) argument that, theatre should not only be an instrument enabling us to criticise society, but also a place in need of critical understanding. Therefore, those artists who wish to express their critical views onstage should make no exceptions when they are personally concerned. In the choir’s spontaneous street performative actions ‘the past’ is not a monolithic block, nor ‘the present’ is a static and neutral representation of the government’s historical intervention. The purpose of their performance is to investigate and expose the inseparability of memory, imagination, sensorial perception and actuality through embodied action.

Dr Elena Marchevska is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher (BA, Theatre directing; MFA, Performance The School of The Art Institute of Chicago; PhD, University of Northampton). Following her doctoral study on screen and feminist performance practice, she focused on contemporary multimedia performance practices. Her primary interest was on the use of the screen in performance; through exploring performances that brought together screen, somatic practice and auto ethnography, she has increasingly turned her attention to relationships between performance, female body and digital writing. She is currently working on research about radical self- organised performance practices in South East Europe and their urban manifestation.

106 Panel Sessions 2 Friday 5th September 10.00-11.30am

Sita Popat Questions Concerning Movement and Technology

Heidegger warned in his essay The Question Concerning Technology that technology distances us from the world so that we do not even notice its impact upon our perceptions. It leads us into a state of withdrawal by displacing us from direct contact with the natural environment and the rhythms of life, but it lulls us into the belief that there is no such withdrawal. Thus we live in withdrawal from our withdrawal from the world. His essay ends with the proposal that the arts might be the saving power to redeem us through their poetic revealing of the human condition.

This paper points out the flaw in the way that Heidegger approaches art as the saving power. It proposes, more specifically, that aesthetic movement is the most effective way to enable humans to develop an understanding of technology’s essence, since it offers a unique critical standpoint through embodied engagement. The paper argues that such movement can problematize the essence of technology, calling into question the notions of Cartesian subjectivity that separate mind and body that remain residually present in Heidegger’s thesis, and thus revealing technology’s essence via the mechanism of the uncanny.

The discussion will draw upon performance examples includingSpidercrab (a dancing robot using Laban Movement Analysis). Such technologies make the body itself present-to-hand in that they foreground movement in a bringing- forth of expression and communication. Can they, then, offer an avoidance of withdrawal from withdrawal in Heidegger’s terms, and where does the uncanny lie in this argument?

Sita Popat is Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of Leeds. Her research interests lie at the intersection of dance, the body and digital media. She is author of Invisible Connections: Dance, Choreography and Internet Communities (Routledge 2006) and co-editor of Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave 2011). She is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Taylor & Francis) and she sits on the Board of Trustees for DV8 Physical Theatre. Twice a week she is a healer in World of Warcraft guild raids with her two sons.

107 Jennifer Parker-Starbuck Cyborg Returns: Always-Already Subject Technologies

Growing out of the cyborg matrix from Parker-Starbuck’s Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Palgrave, 2011), this paper returns to this model as a continuing tool for performance analysis. The two throughlines comprising its frame--body and technology--continue to remain open to interpretation and renewed consideration for each generation of scholars and artists. As subsets of these larger terms, the complex ideas of the abject, object, and subject afford a progression from their historically problematic readings towards renewed ideas about bodies in a technological world. As we move further into the twenty-first century they might be replaced with less human-centric terms, but what remains at stake is the ongoing critical analysis of how these mergings take place and what problems and possibilities they can offer. What can be learned about the times we live in, the conditions of our physical lives? How might these models suggest methodologies for analysis of ongoing performance/theatrical experimentation between bodies and technologies, organic and non-organic organisms?

The paper introduces Parker-Starbuck’s larger co-written projectPerformance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (with Sarah Bay-Cheng and David Saltz) and specifically, her chapter expanding Cyborg Theatre’s matrix through the premise that all technology is now always-already subject. This claim links to what scientists call “evolutionary history,” classification systems formed around changing relationships of the taxa; it is now impossible to understand ‘abject’ or ‘object’ technologies without their inherent ‘subject’ qualities. Parker-Starbuck discusses her observance that with a tacit understanding of technology as ‘subject,’ practitioners are returning to older forms, techniques, histories, stories. As technology has become embedded into our understandings of the world and appears less a fascination in and of itself, its use also takes on a ‘retro’ quality and is a way to return to and comment on older forms.

Dr. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck is Reader in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University in London. She is the author of Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Her essays and reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal, PAJ, Women and Performance, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Western European Stages, and others. She is Assistant Editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. Her recent work explores animality and performance and she is co-editor of Performing Animality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

108 Louise LePage Dramatic Stagings of Robots and Humans in Living Rooms: A Study of Posthumanist Forms

A raft of plays in the last few years have started to cast robots as performers of characters. One reason for the appearance of robots in stage plays must be, of course, that robots are ceasing to be pure science fiction and becoming twenty-first century reality. Located at the entrance to the so-called ‘age of the robot,’ engineers are designing and constructing robots to perform as sociable participants in real world contexts, and playwrights and practitioners are responding by imagining and representing ‘what if?’ scenarios on the stage as they wrestle with such questions as: What will robots look like? What characters will these robots take? What functions will they fulfil? What sorts of relationships will humans form with them? And how will robots challenge our understanding of life, reality, and human being?

My paper will explore the status of robots in a number of plays, including Seinendan Theatre Company’s Three Sisters: Android Version (2012) ( Japan), that position humans and robots as uncanny kin in living rooms and, in the process, imaginatively articulate and explore possible posthumanist landscapes. I will argue that the robot’s location in drama is uncomfortable and uneasy: robots don’t belong in modern drama – conventionally, their homes have been the fantastical landscapes of science fiction – and their iconic sf status unsettles drama’s conventions. However, in spite of the awkward marriage of ontology and form, the presence of robots on stage in drama’s living rooms is, I suggest, richly revealing of contemporary conceptions about, and hopes for, humans, robots, and posthumanist society, at the same time as it indicates possible ways forward for theatre that might become more fully posthumanist.

Dr. Louise LePage’s research lies in contemporary and posthumanist theatre that engages with ideas about what it means to be human. Currently she is researching the form and place of robots in drama. She is a Teaching Fellow in the Drama and Theatre Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she designs and teaches courses on contemporary British drama. LePage is co-editing Twenty-First Century Drama for Palgrave (forthcoming 2015) and has published on Katie Mitchell and Sarah Kane. She has also organised a symposium on theatrical representations of the human and co-edited Platform’s special issue, ‘Representing the Human’ (Summer 2012). Louise has been on the organising committee for this year’s TaPRA conference at RHUL.

109 Working Groups Session 4 & Business Meeting Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Aristita I. Albacan Flash mobs as Performance: the re-emergence of creative communities

In spite of their very brief history (the first modern flash mob took place at Macy’s in NY, on the evening of 17th of June 2003) flash mobs have rapidly and successfully spread throughout the Western world and developed into what can arguably can be defined as a fluid, nomadic and most of all novel mode of performance that aims to stimulate the re-emergence of creative communities, foreground agency and direct address/response to a range of topics of societal currency (political, cultural, artistic, everyday life, etc.) via a perfomative act that becomes visible within the public sphere, and hybridize aesthetic and medial conventions of making and spectating in unexpected ways. Although fleeting and ephemeral in terms of its constituency, sometimes coming together just for one single event, these creative communities articulate quickly and effectively a mode of making and performing that blurs the boundaries between spectating and performing, and leads participants - as a whole and through their act – to modes of expression that become visible both in the public space and the social media/ digital media landscape. Whether there are categorized/ acknowledged/ perceived as street entertainment, performative activism/ actionism, or a mode of advertisement, the results of these ever so brief performative processes and events - the flash mobs - are most commonly perceived by both participants and onlookers as playfully ‘liberating,’ and recuperating/ re-appropriating, even if momentarily, the public sphere for the sake of a ‘better cause,’ which explains their growing popularity and their ascending status within the field of the performative. Drawing on Howard Rheingold’s theory of the ‘smart mobs,’ the performative avant-garde(s) and devising processes, this paper aims to introduce the idea that flash mobs hold the potential to propose a novel model for participatory performance in the 21st century, that merges digital and performative modes of making and production.

Dr. Aristita I. Albacan is a theatre practitioner, teacher and scholar with research interests/specialisms in notions of intermediality, contemporary spectatorship, and contemporary performance making processes, Robert Lepage’s theatre work and applied theatre. She lectures in Theatre and Performance at School of Arts and New Media, University of Hull, where she also acts as Director of Studies for Theatre and

110 Performance. In 2010, she has initiated and co-coordinates the Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Practices Cluster (ICP Cluster link: http://icpcluster.org/index.php). As a practitioner/theatre director she has developed contemporary work in various settings in the past 15 years in Romania, Germany, US and UK.

Jo Scott Making: New – encounters through new technology in performance

This practice based presentation engages with the key issue of newness in the field of performance and ‘new’ technology, arguing through that rather than simply engaging with new technology, this is rather a field of performance which by its nature and predominant inclinations, makes new, whatever tools are employed.

Manovich (2001) argues that the language of new media is not ‘a single language’ but ‘various conventions used by designers of new media objects’ (7), while Bolter and Grusin (2000) claim that all new technology can do is ‘define itself in relationship to earlier technologies’ (28). Kember and Zylinksa (2012) have recently developed the discourse in the field. Rather than looking at the particular conventions of new media objects or the relationships between ‘old’ and ‘new’, their proposal is ‘to refocus the new media debate on a set of processes’ (xv) and it is this provocation which leads my argument in this presentation, as a ‘new’ media practitioner-researcher.

In the live media performance work I make, I am drawn to and facilitated by the use of new technology. However, the newness of the forms I generate lies in actions, encounters and processes with and through the media objects present rather than in the objects themselves. In this presentation, I argue that a focus on newness as positioned in such processes provides a more productive perspective on the work made. I also suggest that being drawn to create and analyse performance using such tools indicates an exploratory inclination in this field, towards the possibilities of the encounter between human and technology and what is made new in this ‘interlocking of technical and biological processes’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012: xiii).

Jo Scott is a practitioner-researcher, visiting lecturer and PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Her work centres on the development and investigation of live intermediality, a mode of performance developed through practice as research, which involves the live generation of an intermedial space through the activation of a range of technical mediums in real time. Jo has presented her work in a variety of contexts from London to San Francisco and is now engaged in writing up her doctoral thesis for submission in 2014. www.joanneemmascott.com

111 Maria Chatzichristodoulou Live Art in Network Cultures

Life, today, is networked. Manuel Castells argues that networks constitute the new social morphology of our society (2010); Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer suggest that networks have become “the defining characteristic[s] of twenty-first-century social and spatial organisation” (2008). Network culture permeates all aspects of contemporary everyday life and should be understood not as a technological phenomenon but as “a broad sociocultural shift”, under which “both art and everyday life take mediation as a given.” (Varnelis, 2008) Furthermore, Derrick de Kerckhove acknowledges that, perhaps unexpectedly, “penetrating at the heart of current networking dynamics” is not, as one might expect, a focus on the technology, but “a growing trend towards interest in people, in their way of connecting and their socio-cultural friendships and relations” (2008, 11).

Network culture profoundly impacts upon the way live artists today both think about their work and create new work. The paper Live Art in Network Cultures is concerned with the network cultures’ impact on live art by focusing on practices that do not make use of networking technologies but are, nonetheless, still affected by a sociocultural shift that entails mediation, merges the digital and the physical/bodily, extends the sense of liveness into the digital sphere (digital liveness), and focuses on connectivity between people and technologies. It asks how network cultures affect live art practices in ways that are not as overt as their engagement with technological innovation but are, instead, discreet, subtle, unexpected or surprising. It seeks to study live art practices that participate in network culture through their ethos of social networking, desire for connectivity, openness to audience participation and contribution, distributed nature, or fragmented, post-network aesthetics; and asks how these practices, alongside other participative media and performance cultures, broaden, question or challenge established understandings of what constitutes live performance today.

Dr Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X] is curator, performer and Lecturer at the School of Drama, Music and Screen, University of Hull. She is co-editor of the volumes Interfaces of Performance (Ashgate, 2009) and Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Her essays and reviews have appeared in Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, Leonardo, Visual Culture in Britain, Body Space Technology and Gender Forum. She was co-director of the international media art festival Medi@terra and Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (Athens, Greece, 1996-2002); and co-convener of the Thursday

112 Club (Goldsmiths University of London, 2006-2009). Her monograph Live Art in Network Cultures and the edited collection Live Art and Performance Art in the UK: A Reader are forthcoming (2016).

Julian Maynard Smith, Rob White and David McLellan Telematically Reciprocating Motorised Doors

Station House Opera has pioneered telematic performance since 2004. During artistic director Julian Maynard Smith’s AHRC fellowship at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, several dramaturgical innovations for telematic theatre have emerged.

Station House Opera’s performance Dissolved (March 2014 - review http:// exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/dissolved/) linked Berlin and London with reciprocal real-time performance via video streaming. Audiences in both places saw two locations merged together as if a single place, populated by ghost-like performers who were able to combine into solid-looking hybrids. To the extent their actions were in sync, they appeared as single, if complex, entities.

Performers were impelled to remain connected if they were to gain agency in the shared world, but this came at the cost of individual freedoms. A battle ensued between these two objectives.

In each location was a door, which when opened in one location closed in the other, thus connecting the performers via a physical interactive object in each location. Our presentation will discuss both the details of the technical realisation and its performative clues to notions of remote presence and control. Many applications of the ‘Internet of Things’ tend to be primarily unidirectional. Here, technical innovation will provide an almost instant physical reciprocity that mirrors human gesture. Actions are linked together, giving a physical presence to the absent performer - as opposed to video images that merely give an appearance of their presence.

In alliance with the performers’ identity dichotomy, the opposing functions of the door (opening as it is closing) focus attention on the phenomenon that as technology provides an ever more seamless mediated experience it becomes increasingly invisible, embedded in subconscious expectation.

An extended paper, video documentation of Dissolved, and technical discussion of the design of the doors’ internet control systems, will suggest how these may develop the future of telematics in theatre. 113 Julian Maynard Smith is the leader of Station House Opera, a company that has produced work at the intersection of theatre and the visual arts since 1980, using sculptural and behavioural structures to give form to the human use and perception of space, both material and imaginary. It has varied from spectacular architectural site-specific projects to intimate theatre pieces, and is a pioneer of theatre using spaces connected by the internet. He is Research Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama developing strategies for telematic theatre. www.stationhouseopera.com

David McLellan is a London based new media artist and multi-disciplinary designer who combines interaction design, programming and engineering to create responsive environments and devices that explore the dynamic relation between people, architectural spaces and technology. Working across a wide range of media, he employs technologies and theories from robotics, nature inspired computing, agent technologies and cybernetics to investigate the development of these ‘smart’ environments and the resulting digital ecologies.

Rob White is an award-winning new media artist and interactive systems designer. His work is primarily concerned with intuitive interfaces, physical computing and notions of remoteness and proximity. Previously he was Course Director of the University of the Arts masters degree in Interactive Media. He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. www.interactivemediaarts.co.uk

Eirini Nedelkopoulou Participate or Else…: A Story or Two About Ubiquitous Performance Practice

Technological innovations, from RFID databases, ubiquitous networks to the Internet of Things and distributed cognition, have a significant impact on artistic practice, cultural production and, as an extension, on modes of audience participation. Drawing on different examples of intermedial performance (UVA, Rimini Protokoll, Blast Theory), the paper focuses on the relational and ubiquitous aspects of technologies, which according to Katherine Hayles offer the audience “the power to really move into the environment, surveil what’s happening and also communicate between the devices” (2009: 48). Audiences are hardly ever left alone, as even their idleness activates or deactivates certain aspects of the art works. The distributed nature of technologies enables constant communication between different devices and the participants, while it responds to both individual and group activities, presenting the audience with the choice to be alone, while together. Nevertheless, ubiquitous technology can bring to the foreground networking anxiety often identified with surveillance, invasion of privacy, and even commodification of interactivity. The question that this

114 paper poses is whether participation in the context of networked intermedial practice becomes a case of participate or…else, or, as Jason Farman puts it, “participate or lose all agency” (70: 2012). Does the audience’s constant visibility escape any treacherous scenarios of a dystopian cultural production? And finally to what extent could this visibility be enabling - moving away from the troubling theme of surveillance - in a context that so keenly seeks for new modes of participation and rigorous management of the audience’s attention?

Dr. Eirini Nedelkopoulou is a Lecturer in Theatre at York St John University. She has published on interactive performance, participation, digital media art and phenomenology. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Performance & Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations (Routledge) and of the special issue “Hybridity: The intersections between Performance and Science” (International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, Taylor & Francis).

Martin Blain The Good, The God, and The Guillotine: Collaboration, Technology, Liveness

For Bob Ostertag, one area to pursue in reclaiming mediated devices into the world of live performance is the role of the body in performance. Pierre Hébert, a frequent collaborator of Ostertag, suggested that, the measure of a work of art is whether one can sense in it the presence of the artist’s body. Notions of performer embodiment and, in particular, the proprioceptive relationship that is developed within the musician in relation to an interface device (be it computer or a conventional musical instrument) are not new, however the computer as musical instrument continues to pose a unique set of affordance issues in relation to live performance.

The Good, The God, and The Guillotine is a collaborative project between laptop musicians (MMUle), a theatre ensemble (Proto-type Theater), a video artist and a lighting designer. For me (composer/performer within MMUle), the intimacy of the interaction between human/musician and machine exposed through ‘live’ performance has resulted in a relationship that is constantly in a process of negotiation. This paper will consider some of the technical approaches and performance strategies that have emerged from this collaboration with particular focus on performance codes that attempt to manage the audience experience. It will consider the relationship between the musician and the computer as musical instrument within the mise-en-scene; and the causal relationship between performative action and resulting sound. It will explore this in light of MMUle’s approach to expand the affordance of the laptop computer 115 in relation to its musical and performative potential. The paper will draw on the work of Power (2008), Cascone (2003), Emmerson (2007), and Kirby (1972), to offer insights into the practices at play in this collaborative work. The Good, The God, and The Guillotine is funded by the Arts Council England, Lincoln Performing Arts Centre and MMU and is touring nationally.

Martin Blain is Reader at Manchester Metropolitan University at Cheshire. He is a composer and performer and is the Musical Director of MMUle (Manchester Metropolitan University laptop ensemble). In addition to working as Music Director for MMUle, he also works with a variety of leading contemporary music ensembles such as Apollo Saxophone Quartet, BackBeat Percussion Ensemble, Equivox. Martin has published on collaboration and laptop performance practice in Music Performance Research and the Journal of Music, Technology and Education.

116 Performance and the Body Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Laura Bissell and David Overend Rhythmic Routes: Developing a nomadic physical practice for the daily commute

How can the contemporary performance practitioner maintain a deterritorialised, nomadic existence within the regulated systems of twenty-first century mobile life? Elliott and Urry (2010) argue that ‘life “on the move” appears to unfold faster and faster in the early days of the twenty-first century, as people become more reliant upon interdependent, digitised systems’. In contrast, the nomad is an aspirational figure who moves through places, ‘cut free of roots, bonds and fixed identities’ (Pearson, 2010). Responding to the increasingly globalised context of mobilities and Braidotti’s (2011) notion of ‘becoming-nomad’, this paper asks whether nomadism can offer an alternative to perceptions of place created through the systemisation and repetition of everyday journeys.

This paper introduces and reflects on an ongoing collaborative research project by David Overend and Laura Bissell. Focussing on the everyday rhythms of commuting, this practice-based enquiry uses Lefebvre’s (1992) Rhythmanalysis to explore the interrelatedness of time and space in the routines of our everyday journeys. Rejecting conventional narratives of the ‘weary and dystopian commuter’ (Edensor 2011), Overend and Bissell aim to develop a series of performative interventions that reimagine commuting as a creative and productive embodied practice with the potential for nomadic disruptions to the routines and rhythms of our everyday journeys. This project challenges the relationship between our bodies and the places we are moved through during the daily commute by physically moving through these places via the embodied practice of walking, cycling and swimming. By reflecting on their alternative commutes and engaging critically with ideas around nomadism and mobilities, the commute is reimagined as a time and space of creative possibility.

Laura Bissell is a lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practice within the School of Drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Laura is a visiting lecturer on 117 the MRes in Creative Practices at Glasgow School of Art and the Transart Institute in Berlin and has presented her research on contemporary practices at conferences nationally and internationally. Laura’s research interests include: contemporary performance practices and methodologies; technology and performance; live art; feminist performance and performance and journeys. Laura is currently working on a collaborative research project exploring commuting as part of her involvement in the Making Routes network.

David Overend is a freelance director and lecturer in contemporary theatre and performance at the University of the West of Scotland. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and was Associate Artist at the Arches arts centre (2007- 2010). David’s research interests are interdisciplinary and focus on contemporary theatre and performance. He is currently working on performance and mobilities, site-specific theatre and relational theatre practice and is involved in the Making Routes network.

Vicky Hunter Do You Come Here Often? Mapping Urban Space through Embodied Encounters

This paper explores individual relationships between body and place resulting from topographic processes of connecting and situating oneself in urban locations through the performance of habitual, repetitive and embodied movement patterns. It considers how site-specific performance might expose, and reinforce subjective connections to place and also propose new ones for the experiencer. Theory drawn from Human Geography (Massey, Tuan,) Phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Tilley), and Spatial and Architectural theory (Perec, Rendell) inform the discussion of the embodied ‘mapping’ of urban space through repeated movement patterns and pathways that metaphorically ‘wear a groove’ into perceptions of the urban landscape.

The extension of these processes into site-specific performance by artists is considered here informed by works that explore themes of mobility, traversing, mapping and re-mapping the urban i.e. Lone Twin’s The Days of The Sledgehammer Have Gone (2004) Wili Dorner’s Bodies in Urban Spaces (2013) and Steve Koplowitz Red Line Time (2013) performed in the Los Angeles metro system. The paper considers how this type of site-specific performance can foster an individual’s connection with place through the performative event in which a relationship of ‘playful familiarity’ is fostered, as formal and functional urban facades are re-inscribed. Through this engagement with a playful place of performance the paper explores how new associations

118 and meanings are developed and new connections made as the site is effectively put ‘on the map’ in a different manner for the individual informing subsequent ‘mappings’ of and encounters between body, space and place.

Vicky Hunter is a Practitioner-Researcher and Lecturer in Dance at the University Chichester. Her research explores site-specific dance and performance it is practice- based and examines the body’s phenomenological engagement with space and place through a consideration of the individual’s corporeal, spatial and kinetic engagement with their environment. She is currently preparing an edited volume entitled Moving Sites: investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance for Routledge publishers (forthcoming Jan 2015).

Liam Jarvis Body Transfer Illusions in Analogue’s Transports

Notable neuroscientists such as Oliver Sacks in his book An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), recognise the limitations that the scientific paradigm presents in our understanding of the embodied experience of neurological disorders. He suggests that the realities of patients cannot be comprehended from observation alone; we must also employ an intersubjective approach, ‘…leaping, as Foucault writes, ‘into the interior of morbid consciousness, [trying] to see the pathological world with the eyes of the patient himself ’’ (xvi-xvii). This paper will examine instances of immersive practice that attempt to mobilise Sacks’ proposition by placing the participant inside a simulation of a neural subject’s body.

In particular, I will scrutinise the relationship between the virtual body and the corporeal body through the development process of Analogue’s Transports. This pilot project, supported by The Wellcome Trust, is a series of immersive experiences in which the participant interacts with a tablet device. Each work is designed to place the live participant inside a ‘first-person’ simulation of a subject whose condition has profoundly altered their interactions with the environment as a direct result of sensory impairments, motor impairments and cognitive impairments. In each of the experiences, a virtual hand on the screen belonging to a neural subject comes to represent that of the participants; a pre- recorded film guides the audience’s hand to interact with tactile props that correspond with the video footage whilst hearing the subject’s inner thoughts via binaural sounds relayed on headphones. The first experience to be tested with audiences explores the symptoms of tremor and slurred speech in those living with Young-Onset Parkinson’s disease. This interdisciplinary project is being developed alongside our scientific collaborator in the field of behavioural neuroscience, Professor Narender Ramnani (Royal Holloway University) with 119 the support of charitable organisation Parkinson’s UK.

I will draw on the experience of this research within my practice as well as scoping parallel practices in the field of contemporary performance (such as the In My Shoes series of VR works by Sublime and Ridiculous), to critically reflect on the potentials of the ‘haptically incorporated’ participant and the applications of body transfer illusions in performance.

Liam Jarvis is a Visiting Lecturer and AHRC funded PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London, researching theatre practices that incorporate immersive technologies to place audiences inside first-person simulations of neurological patients. His inquiry draws on research in the fields of embodied cognition, affect and neuroscientific research in self-attribution and body ownership to examine how scientific knowledge might intersect with and inform performance practices. Liam is Co-director of Analogue, an interdisciplinary devising theatre company with whom he has been creating award-winning work since 2007, touring both the UK and internationally. Analogue is an Associate Company of Shoreditch Town Hall and Farnham Maltings. In 2012, Liam was appointed as a Fellow at Hanse- Wissenschaftskolleg Advanced Institute for Research (Delmenhorst, Germany).

Royona Mitra Auto-ethnography, ‘inexclusion’ and Akram Khan’s Loose in Flight (1999)

This paper will analyse the dance-film Loose in Flight as an auto-ethnographic enquiry into the dancer and choreographer Akram Khan’s British-Bangladeshi diasporic corporeality and its contested relationship with the marginalised historiography of London’s Docklands. Employing Valerie Briginshaw’s framing of site-specific choreography as politicised body-space dialogues (2001), the paper investigates the significance of Khan’s ‘in-exclusion’ (Roy; 1997) vis-à-vis the derelict cityscape of London’s Docklands, as embodied in the dialogue between Rachel Davies’ dance-film and Khan’s choreography. It further argues that in Khan’s approach to his subject of enquiry, we witness a collapse of boundaries between the participant and the ethnographer, such that he embodies both the enquiry and the enquirer, and is therefore simultaneously in and out of place.

Loose in Flight is Khan’s seminal and first solo which he created while at university between 1995 and 1997 and through which he began to negotiate the corporeal permeations and boundaries between his kathak and contemporary dance training. Performed in the public domain after his graduation, the piece received critical acclaim and signalled Khan’s potential within the future of

120 British contemporary dance. In 1999, British television producer Rosa Rogers of Channel 4 approached Khan to adapt this solo for the screen in collaboration with filmmaker Rachel Davies, as part of a series called Per4mance, designed to promote short collaborations between film-makers and performing artists.

This paper will examine the ways in which Khan and Davies exploit the dance- film medium’s capacity to expose the tensions between socio-geographical spaces and bodies that occupy them. By doing so, the dance-film radically revises the architectural and political structures of the Docklands vis-à-vis its long contested relationship with migrant communities and their ‘in and out of place’ status within this symbolic landscape of London.

Royona Mitra is a Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University, UK where she teaches physical theatre, intercultural performance and critical theory. She has a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London (2011) and an MA in Physical Theatre also from Royal Holloway (2001). She has published in Dance Research Journal, Feminist Review, Women and Performance and has contributed to edited book projects on body, culture and identity. Royona’s monograph entitled Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism is due for publication in early 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan, and is the first book length project to examine the works of this seminal British-Asian artist.

Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Jem Kelly Superimpositions – re-locating bodies in telematic performances, Nowhere (2013) and Dissolved (2014) Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation (c1436)

Fra Angelico’s, The Annunciation, and its placement with other devotional frescoes in the Dominican Monastery of San Marco, Florence offers a starting point from which to examine representations of virtual presence in places of dwelling, contemplation and performance. Derrida’s claim that ‘both the tangible and intangible are the objects of touch’ (2000) is considered in the light of virtual and physical embodiment in Station House Opera’s Nowhere and Dissolved. Following from Barker (2009) the paper develops the idea that as the tangible entails a multiplicity of senses it is possible for the eye to touch what is seen in a form of eye contact that embraces the tactile.

121 In Dissolved, static space is doubled in two remote locations, London and Berlin, producing a non-place in which the superimposition of projected bodies onto walls results in a ghosting that simultaneously reveals and hides identities. A combined virtual embodiment proposes a new, other being comprising two discrete entities that cohabit the same space in different places. Superimposed bodies are simultaneously present and absent during a prelude to the performance during which spectators interact across remote locations with virtual. A form of virtual tactility occurs as performers’ bodies are brought into exact alignment with virtual representations in a ‘hyper dialectical’ form of touching without contact (Derrida).

Space becomes mobile and mutable in Nowhere as two remote cameras revolve synchronously, their images brought together simultaneously, but set in opposition at 180 degrees. Auditory space correlates to the spaces seen, the address of the eye and ear are brought into alignment, yet sound extends to include ambient noises of the space of reception producing a sound field of 720 degrees of auditory perception. The paper examines what new modes of embodiment, actual and virtual, present and absent, projected or felt can be discerned in telematic performances; considering what may come in future practices of this kind.

Jem Kelly is a practise-based researcher specialising in intermedial performance, immersive sound-driven theatre and phenomenology. He has collaborated with Station House Opera on the telematic performances Nowhere (2013) and The Doors (2014), and with Andrea Davidson with Inter-Views (2012). Jem is currently working on a solo performance, Ted, which uses photographs and video of his father to re-invent their relationship. Jem is Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts at Buckinghamshire New University, where he teaches Site-Responsive Performance and Intermediality on the BA and leads the MA. In addition to his academic and theatrical pursuits, Jem also composes and performs original music for theatre, film and television and is a recording artist with The Lotus Eaters.

Jenny Lawson Ungendered Space and Bodies out of Place: Performing Zombie and other figures of female monstrosity

In this paper, I use the zombie as a tool and concept to develop and explore radical approaches to performing bodies out of place. The zombie is ubiquitous in popular culture. Neither living nor dead, the zombie is not locatable in space, place or context; the zombie wanders aimlessly, motivated only by an insatiable desire for human flesh. Operating outside of social and cultural

122 norms, the zombie is a paradox, always in transformation and flux. The zombie is the human body reconfigured - flesh, organs, viscera and limbs are violently ruptured, revealing a disorganised and chaotic body out of order. The zombie does not fall neatly into a canon of female monsters such as vampires or witches. Existing at the edge of being, the zombie has subversive potential and is viewed favourably by feminist film scholars, who argue that the zombie evades gender binaries and offers alternative possibilities for female viewers (MacCormack and Patterson 2008). Zombies are an established cultural phenomenon and performance trend; hordes of people partake in zombie walks or chase games using costume, make-up and props to achieve realistic or ironic zombie representations. The zombie transforms and reconfigures bodies and identities, and possible zombie personas are limitless and multifarious. Re-appropriated zombie images of women include stock clichés such as cheerleaders, nurses or the unspecified woman with her hair in curlers. These female figures are captured in the role of playing ‘woman’ and are often given extreme, highly sexualized, violent make-overs. Developing Barbara Creed’s (1995) theory of the ‘monstrous feminine’ in film, I use the zombie to examine images of female monstrosity in performance. I introduce my recent Practice-as-Research, which investigates the eating-zombie-body, alongside Canadian artist Jillian MacDonald’s Horror Make Up (2006) and Australian artist Catherine Bell’s Felt is the Past Tense of Feel (2006).

Jenny Lawson is a performance maker, live artist and lecturer in Contemporary Performance at the University of Leeds. Jenny’s research interests include food, femininity, domesticity, autobiography, place and popular culture. Jenny recently took part in a residency at ARC, Stockton Arts Centre to develop Dining with Undeath, a performance investigating the eating zombie body, made in collaboration with culinary specialists, Blanch and Shock Food Design. Other works include Lay Down Your Ghosts, Journeys Through the North East, the Festival of the North East 2013; Especially For You, Gateshead International Festival of Theatre 2012; Pin a Pinny, Baltic 39 Gallery part of EAT! NewcastleGateshead 2012; and Bake Me a Cake, Compass Festival of Live Art, Leeds 2011. www.jennylawsonperformance.wordpress.com

Mary Richards “Bring and Do Nothing”: Abramović’s 512 Hours (2014) in the context of Rhythm 0 (1974)

Following the astounding spectator response Marina Abramović generated for her durational performance The Artist is Present (MOMA, March-May 2010), where the pilgrimage to sit with Abramović as part of that work appeared to 123 elevate her status in the media to something akin to a quasi-religious superstar, Abramović will commence 512 Hours at the Serpentine Gallery, London; remarkably her first durational performance in this city. For 64 days, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week from June-August 2014, Abramović will “bring and do nothing” in this free-to-enter space in the heart of London. This paper will consider to what extent this is a new departure or a reiteration of the announcement she made some 40 years ago in Galleria Studio Morra, Naples “I am an object, you can do anything you want to do with me, I will take responsibility for 6 hours” as the now notorious Rhythm 0 (1974) commenced and audience members were allowed to directly engage/misplace the artist through the 72 objects left at their disposal. I will consider the specifics of place, time and space that marked out this early performance work as both a seminal and a signature piece, before considering how the gallery itself and 512 Hours places/misplaces/displaces the spectator and the artist. Moreover, I will further consider how perhaps the premise of 512 Hours can be seen to reflect something of the wider shifts in perception and functioning of performance art, notions of ‘immersion’ and participatory practice.

Mary Richards is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University, London. Mary has published articles on a range of live art and performance practices as well as a monograph on Marina Abramovic for Routledge. Mary is currently working on a science/art collaboration with a particle physicist.

Panel Sessions 1 Thursday 4th September 11.30-1.00pm

Broderick Chow The Self-Made Man: fitness and the body as the site of masculine self-fashioning

The practice of contemporary physical fitness clearly reveals the body as a site for performative inscription by forces including gender, nation, and class. The participation of men in physical fitness programmes seems particularly ‘sited.’ The body is ordered and disciplined by a limited series of repetitive spatial activities that take place in a designated place (the gym). Men’s fitness programmes discursively zone the body and inscribe boundaries upon it: muscle ‘groups’ are ‘worked on’, one ‘works chest’, arms, back. This zoning and disarticulation of the body in a ‘split’ is also temporal. Fitness buffs talk about ‘leg day’, ‘back day’, and so on. As a result of its mechanistic nature men’s fitness has often been read, in

124 body studies, as (cf. Foucault) a governmental practice that produces compliant workers, soldiers and heterosexual fathers, and reproduces patriarchy. However, I propose that such a reading of the fit male body ignores the body’s subjectivity and agency; the fact that fitness isn’t simply performed on men, but rather that men perform fitness. In this essay I place into dialogue a self-reflexive and autoethnographic account of my own training in weightlifting with an analysis of fin-de-siècle strongman George Hackenschmidt’s autobiographical training manual The Way to Live in Health and Physical Fitness, one of the key texts of the physical culture movement. I will suggest that at the same time as the gym is a thing that acts upon the site of the male body, the repetitive activities in the site of the gym are actually performances in which male subjects seek and find what I will call an ‘intensity’ of being. Read against the contemporary working day, this intensity might be read as a countervailing and even resistant tendency.

Broderick Chow is Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University, London, UK, where he teaches theatre history and leads the musical theatre strand of the BA Theatre program. His research concerns the intersections of performance practices, politics, economy, and industrial change, especially in the world of work. His current project examines fitness and masculinity through the lens of performance studies. He has also written on professional wrestling, dance and labour, parkour (free-running), and actor training. He has published in journals including Choreographic Practices and the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices. He is coeditor (with Alex Mangold) of the forthcoming Žižek and Performance (Palgrave, 2014).

Patrick Duggan Dis-eased: performing the politics and power of dirty and dying bodies

Drawing on Barba and Savarese’s notion of pre-expressivity (1991) alongside Lefebvre’s theorisations of (social) space (1991), this paper explores how a strategy of performative tactics (after de Certeau) was deployed by inmates in the Maze prison, Northern Ireland, to gain political agency through the creation of what I am terming a ‘dis-eased place’. The so called ‘dirty protest’ that took place 1978 - 1981 and the 1981 hunger strikes in the Maze Prison were performative protests that implicitly made use of theatrical techniques to disrupt, reclaim and physically and metaphorically inscribe the prison space with a particular set of highly charged embodied politics. These disruptions to the physical space were achieved through what might be thought of as a subversive use of the body – disgusting, dirty, dying.

The paper explores the relationship between the performance of Irish identity in the teaching of the Irish language, the dirty protest and the hunger strikes

125 – performatively, ideologically, politically, bodily – and how the move from the dirty, disgusting and noisy to the sanitised, quiet and dying might be read as materialising a place of ‘dis-ease’ in which the normative penal narratives, power structures and controlling of bodies are radically destabilised. Unlike Heidegger’s anxiety, dis-ease is not a sudden experience of being unheimlich but exposure to a constant threat of being ripped form a state of normalcy and as such it pervades or persists in the everyday. Within the context of the Maze the different modes of protest produce a dis-ease that was not only “productive” in the prison itself – reaffirming/creating collective identity, gaining some level of ownership of the space or re-taking control of the body – but also beyond its walls in the political realm.

Patrick Duggan is Lecturer in Department of Drama, University of Exeter. His publications include Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (MUP 2012), On Trauma (a special issue of Performance Research, (16:1) and Reverberations: Britishness, Aesthetics and Small-Scale Theatre (Intellect 2013). He is currently working on another co-edited volume Performing (for) Survival: Theatre, crisis and extremity (Palgrave 2015) and has begun work on a second monograph project tentatively entitled Dis-eased: Performance and the politics of fear.

Sarah Gorman Feminist Disavowal or Return to Immanence? The Problem of Post-Postructuralism and the Naked Female Form

Since 2010 we have seen a welcome influx of work by female artists to the London/Paris stage. During December and January 2010, Ursula Martinez and Nic Green played to full houses at Barbican’s Pit Theatre and Battersea Arts Centre. Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show appeared as part of the Festival d’Automne, Paris and GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN’s pieces, Big Hits and No1 The Plaza appeared across the UK in 2012 and 2013. Whilst excited by the proposition of new pro-female work, I was somewhat taken aback to find the work so preoccupied by female nudity. Schooled in what Amelia Jones has identified as a British strain of ‘”antiessentialist” feminist postmodernism [of the] 70s and 80s’ I was alarmed by what I initially took to be a return to an essentialist equivocation between the ‘feminine’ and embodied experience. Although the artists undress for different reasons, they each choose to make crucial observations about contemporary female experience with close reference to the naked or partially-clothed female form.

In this paper I excavate the cause of my nervousness about female disrobing and proffer a reading that considers how the work embraces, or avoids the problem

126 of female immanence, that is: the problem of female identity being inextricably associated with the body. As Jones has argued in Body Art: Performing the Subject, ‘selves …are strategically dichotomized in Western patriarchy (dominated by Cartesianism) as a means of situating women always already on the side of immanence’ (Jones 1998:157). From Jones I take the idea that male performers enjoy greater success when attempting to represent transcendence beyond an embodied subjectivity and have heightened potential to create the illusion of a spiritual, cognitive self. In contrast female performers struggle to distance themselves from conventional understandings of women’s experience being fundamentally anchored to a bodily experience.

Sarah Gorman holds the post of Reader in the Department of Drama, Theatre & Performance at Roehampton University, London. Her research focuses on Contemporary Feminist performance and European/North American experimental theatre and Live Art. Her book The End of Reality: The Theatre of Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players was published by Routledge in 2011. She is the author of numerous reviews, articles and chapters having had work published in: Feminist Review, Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, AngloFiles, Western European Stages and Studies in Theatre and Performance. Her Reading as a Woman blog can be found at http:// readingasawoman.wordpress.com.

Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

Claire Hampton (De) Constructing the Female Face in Cyberspace

Framed by the concept that bodies are simultaneously in and out of place in the virtual world, this paper will analyse the #nomakeupselfie phenomenon which took place in March 2014, drawing on two oppositional feminist viewpoints to explore the significance of the selfie in the construction of contemporary female identity via social media. Participants in the no make-up selfie craze were required to take pictures of themselves sans makeup before posting them to social media sites; the No-Slap- Snap became a viral spectacle that usurped every corner of social media environments for over a week raising over £8 million for cancer research.

The act of taking a photograph of oneself, typically with a smartphone and uploading it to a social media website has transformed cyber’space’ into a

127 virtual ‘place’, where millions of images blend to create the landscape of social media. The absence of corporeal bodies in cyberspace results in representation of the body through words and images; bodies are now socially constructed representations that are shaped, governed and liberated by our disembodied online identities.

Analysis of the motivation behind the culturally significant rules and practices of selfie taking has caused a rift in contemporary feminism resulting in two distinct tropes of thought. One side of this dichotomy asserts that selfies offer the radical potential for self representation, empowerment and visibility whilst a counter view suggests that selfies are a reflection of the way patriarchal society indoctrinates women in the belief that physical attractiveness is their most important quality. This paper will argue that whilst the routine act of taking selfies maybe liberating and cathartic, the #nomakeupselfie phenomenon highlighted the normalisation of gender conformity and a social narcissism towards illness.

Claire Hampton is currently a PhD candidate at Brunel University London. Her research centres on the corporeal experience and representation of female trauma specifically in the genre of physical theatre. Her research interests include dance theatre, physical theatre, contemporary feminism, cultural theory, trauma theory and theories of embodiment. In 2012 she published an article in Skepsi entitled ‘Dance Theatre; An Anti-discursive Illustration of an Embodied Existence’. She works as a visiting lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton where she teaches on intercultural theatre and research and analysis. Her interest in the #nomakeupselfie phenomenon was sparked by my own experience as a breast cancer survivor.

Traci Kelly To provoke tears: performing histories of induced weeping

I am proposing an artist presentation on the work Xenograftie (Artificial Sorrow), a 45-minute site-specific performance which took place at the leprosy museum in Bergen, Norway.

…she stayed anxiously beside the door and started to weep…

After failed attempts on rabbits, on the 3rd November 1879 Gerhard Armauer Hansen, poised along a knives edge, relocated leprosy bactillum to the eye of a protesting female. The contamination caused an ocular leprosy node to develop. With respect and sorrow, on the same site of Bergen’s Lepramuseet, the artist introduces a foreign body to her eyes – artificial tears. The intrusion bites the

128 membranes and stirs authentic drops, the hand reaches out…

Xenograftie (Artificial Sorrow) investigates theanimot - the cultural alignment between the animal and the female, coined as a term by Jacques Derrida. The audience witness an act of memorialisation: the fur of a slaughtered rabbit and the hair from the artist gradually cling to the body of the other, translating the languages into which they are written.

Trajectories of the presentation will include tears as embodied archive when produced from personal or collective memory. A reading of historical gender and medical discourses aligned to terms of ‘otherness’ will be offered through the lens of the site-specific performance leading to the questioning of the binary presumption that fakery is necessarily inauthentic.

Traci Kelly is an independent scholar whose practice slips between performance, visual and textual languages. Her poetic and visceral imagery questions the status of the body. Working solo and collaboratively Kelly approaches shared making through lone and viral formations. Current research revolves around skin as a site of encounter and of writing. The spacings between touch and untouch in performance encounters are utilised to consider subject invention. Kelly has a doctorate on intersubjectivity and collaboration as a methodology for live art practice from Reading University. Kelly is Co-Artistic Director of hancock & kelly live, a performance company renowned for its visceral explorations of the politicised body. She has presented work throughout Europe and in Australia, North and Central America.

Adelina Ong Can Bodies Resist Panoptic Control Through Parkour-inspired Applied Theatre Practice?

De Certeau proposes that walking involves ‘the art of composing a path (tourner un parcours)’ and claims this walker can thwart the effect of the ‘panopticon’, not just because his path is unpredictable, but also because his dreamlike amble steals time (not goods) away from profit-driven activities (de Certeau 1984: 100, 25). This diversionary tactic that causes disruption from within the ‘panopticon’ is identified as a form of ‘la perruque’ (25). I have tried to test de Certeau’s la‘ perruque’ through two case studies, conducted in London and Singapore, that experiment with an applied theatre practice inspired by parkour.

Parkour is an urban practice that views the city as a playground where obstacles like walls become floors to be walked on, and ledges to spring from. Each obstacle becomes an opportunity to create new moves, new ways to play within 129 the city and improve one’s skill. One who practices parkour is often called a ‘traceuse’ (female) or ‘traceur’ (male), in other words, one who ‘traces a path’ through the city. Parkour emphasises playfulness within an urban environment that has strict rules about where one might play and how one should behave. The playfulness of parkour appears resistant to ‘signal architecture’ defined by Iain Borden as architecture that directs its users to obey the ‘underlying logic of profit, exchange, efficiency, control, normalcy, predictability’ that regulates spatial behaviour and time within these sites (Borden 2001: 231). In this presentation, I will be reflecting on parkour as an active metaphor for shifting one’s pathways in life, and the potential mobility this offers for ‘vulnerable’ young people.

Adelina Ong is currently a PhD candidate at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She has been active in Singapore’s theatre scene from 1997 as a performer, director and producer co-organising interdisciplinary festivals such as Digital Compassion (2002) and Pulp (2003). She established one:lab in 2010 as a vehicle for producing and performing work that sought to address vital social issues through performance and theatre-led interventions. From 2008 to 2012 she managed an interdisciplinary arts school for children and youths from low-income families and personally taught the youth theatre programme. In 2010, she was selected for Social Leadership Singapore, a leadership course led by Professor Dean Williams from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.

Victor Ramirez Ladron De Guevara Liquid Boundaries: Cartesian Dualism, Abjection and Aesthetics of the Performer’s Sweat

This paper will look at the role and understanding of sweat and sweating in a number of Performance Practice case studies. Often dismissed as a by- product (an unnecessary and even undesirable consequence of a strenuous physical activity) it is the premise of this paper that the act of sweating confers epistemological and ontological significance to the way in which we understand and engage with the act of performing. Ranging from the Cartesian standpoint (the ‘no pain no gain’ attitude when sweating is required as a proof of doing the maximum possible effort), to its potential abject quality (that is the disgust and aversion caused by sweating when is perceived as an unhygienic act) it is argued in this paper that our attitudes to sweat also serve to delineate the boundaries between the self, its place and the other.

Finally, those prevalent attitudes to sweat as experienced in the West will be compared to a number of non-Western performative/ritual practices (such as the India Martial art kalarippayattu and the Sweating Lodge ceremonies

130 practiced by a number of Native American Indigenous groups). In those practices, is argued, the act of sweating is conferred a special meaning, substance and beauty.

Victor Ladron de Guevara is a lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Plymouth. His scholarly work is centred on the study of intercultural and physical theatre. He also has 16 years experience as a performer and director working in México and England and has trained in a range of diverse disciplines embracing aspects of Eastern as well as Western theatre praxis.

Panel Sessions 2 Friday 5th September 10.00-11.30am

P. Solomon Lennox The Permeability of Place: My body in the field

In a repetitive working pattern, my bodily limits are exceeded. Boundaries are permeated, essential elements expelled, adopted and held secure by the architecture of the space. The structure of the boxing gym is as permeable as the bodies of my participants. I pour into the space. I splatter and spurt onto my training partners. With my gloved fist, I wipe myself out of my eyes, before driving myself into the flesh of my participants. Beneath my feet, dusty wooden floorboards soak up the excess elements of self. The vapors of testosterone perfume the moist air. Cracked mirrors are caked in a mixture of dry and fresh sweat. My bodily boundaries are fluid. Exposed concrete walls suck fluid from the air. Elements of each of the working bodies in the space mix together to form a single body, part liquid, part gas, part solid. As I soak into the architecture I add to a remembered presence, a mixing of boxing bodies, coating the interior of the space. Long after I leave, parts of my body remain, as much a part of the architecture as the bricks and mortar of the gym. I offer a performative proposal, a 30-minute interrogation of the relationship between bodies and space. I invite participants to join me for a simulated and structured boxing sparring session. In a one-to-one performative event, participants are invited to don protective gear and box me for 2 minutes. I will narrate stories about my experience of bodies and space as I dodge and defend their attacks. The event will provide an interrogation of bodies in space, whilst providing participants with the opportunity to imagine and reflect upon the performance of their bodies within the space of the boxing gym.

131 P. Solomon Lennox is a Lecturer in Performing Arts at Northumbria University. In September 2014. His research interests are “performance ethnographies”, “narrative inquiry”, “gender performance”, “sport and performance”. His PhD consisted of an ethnographic exploration of two boxing gyms in the UK. The thesis identified the narrative resources used by boxers to make sense of their performance of self. Solomon creates performance texts to explore the role and importance of bodies within performance.

Working Groups Session 4 & Business Meeting Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Juliana Coelho de Souza Ladeira Cosmology and body: the relationship between human body and the Balinese cosmic cartography

In this paper I will investigate the relationship between the human body and Balinese cosmological thinking of the world. In Balinese thought, the architecture of building, the configuration of the cities (desa), the temples (pura) and of spectacular forms are oriented along the nawa-sanga, the Balinese compass rose of nine directions. These directions are intimately related to the Balinese conception of the world and their meaning is beyond the boundaries of purely physical and geographical dimensions. The human body is also conceived as a nawa-sanga. Among others, it represents the four cardinal points under the geographical perspective of the island: kaja (“towards the mountain”) is always oriented towards the volcano Gunung Agung, kelod (“towards the sea”), kangin (“where the sun rises”) and kauh (west). The Gunung Agung volcano is the residence of the gods and is considered the centre of the island. The sea, however, is considered the den of dangerous forces and demons. TheAsta Kosala Kosali and the Asta Patali treaties, originally written in Old Javanese, govern the principles of Balinese architecture. Measurements are made based on human scale and on human body parts. Orientation principles are important and developed notions in Balinese thinking and in daily life. The performer’s body is conceived also as the nawa-saga, in intimate connection with the landscape of the island. In this paper, I will try to articulate the relationship between the body of the dancer, the geomorphology of the island and the Balinese cosmic cartography thinking.

Juliana Coelho de Souza Ladeira, from Brazil, is a PhD student at Paris VIII 132 University, researching intercultural contributions to Balinese dance. In 2008, she obtained a Master’s degree with work from Paris VIII. In 2005, she graduated in Acting at the Fine Arts’ School of Minas Gerais’ Federal University where she became a professor of physical training and acting in 2006. Since 2004, she has developed practical and theoretical research on the actor’s creative processes and the mask. In 2008 and 2011, she visited Bali to study topeng with Cristina Wistari Formaggia and I Ketut Kodi, the gabor dance with Cok Pring and Balinese singing with Ni Nyoman Candri.

Margaret Ames The place of the performer with learning disabilities: Thoughts on presence, virtuosity and social constructions of the (dis)abled artist

In response to the areas of possible focus outlined in the call for participation this contribution would fall under the categories of body as site of performance and bodies, class and classification.

This paper will consider tensions between the ongoing social constructions in the UK of art as beneficial and the place of the artist with disabilities constructed as beneficiary. As arguments in Disability Studies foreground social constructions of learning disability so too the bureaucratic place holders of ‘the arts’ construct artists with learning disabilities as beneficiaries.

Through examples of moments taken from practice based research I will discuss alternative perceptions of dance-theatre made by and with performers with learning disabilities. Issues of training and virtuosic performance will be juxtaposed with the notion of the presence of the untrained performer as equally compelling yet this itself gives rise to certain ethical dilemmas for the spectator and the director. The political potential of such moments of performances of alternative beauty prompts awareness to alternative ground to that of the territory of beneficiary. Unsettling categorization and opening this wider territory of aesthetic appreciation may create a place for the artist with cognitive difference that dispenses with instrumental binary designations of beneficiary, and expert professional. However rather than argue against training endeavours, the focus will be on how performers with learning disabilities might develop other practices of rigour and discipline through commitment to the work of performance.

Margaret Ames is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth and works with Cyrff Ystwyth who produce dance-theatre. This company responds to the agenda of colleagues with learning disabilities and form the focus of her practice as research. 133 She was Artistic Director of Dawns Dyfed, the community dance project covering the three counties of the west of Wales. She has performed in dance and physical theatre with former Welsh company Brith Gof and also as a Dance Movement Therapist with children and in adult psychiatric settings. She is interested in how live performance created by people with learning disabilities speaks to mainstream theatre and how such work might reveal embodied knowledge about place and identity.

Jyoti Argade [h]interland: Alternative Modernities and the Rearrangement of (Post)colonial Space

An historical analysis of Shobana Jeyasingh’s site-specific choreographic work, [h]interland (2002), is a particularly apt topic for the TaPra Performance and the Body Working Group: Bodies In and Out of Place. One of Britain’s most lauded choreographers over the last 25 years, Jeyasingh suspends this multimedia work between the cosmopolitan spaces of London and Bangalore. Evocative of Arjun Appadurai’s theory of “technoscapes,” [h]interland transgresses national, political, and economic borders through decentred and displaced corporealities of classical and contemporary dance, via a real-time projected webcast of the dancer, Chitra Srishailan, from the rooftop of a hotel located in Bangalore, India’s IT capital, and through a rearrangement of (post)colonial time and space at Greenwich’s Borough Hall, less than a mile from the Prime Meridian, a vestigial signification of the British Empire’s proclamation as the centre of the world. In the live performance, Mavin Khoo and Sowmya Gopalan (collectively trained in bharata natyam, ballet, odissi, and western contemporary) carve pathways across the hall with frenetic and dissonant deconstructions of dance vocabularies, a hallmark of Jeyasingh’s investigations of the body between locations of culture(s), cities, and classical boundaries. In this paper, I argue that [h]interland marks a pivotal moment that exposes the shortcomings of Britain’s multicultural policies of celebrating the “authenticity” of ethnic bodies and communities, while managing difference in relation to disjunctive and normalising articulations of Britishness. Through its splintered mediations of space, time, and classical movement vernaculars, [h]interland heralds a decade of alternative modernities where uneven exchanges of capital persist between nations and people, yet global centres multiply, information technology perforates borders, and bodies bear the inscriptions of multiple geographies, histories, and urgencies of motion.

Jyoti Argade is a practitioner, researcher and producer of dance. Her research explores the global circulation of “modern” and “classical” Indian dance styles across India, the United States, and Britain. In 2009, on a William J. Fulbright Fellowship to

134 India, she worked with blind bharata natyam dancers in Bangalore and conducted a study on how classical Indian dance styles are being mobilised to address public health concerns and cultures of disability. In 2010, she produced a British Council-sponsored project with the London-based Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company, launching a three-year choreographic collaboration between new media artists in London and India’s metropolitan cities. She is currently a Senior Lecturer.

Prathana Purkayastha Devi, the Divine Dancer, Goes to Kolkata

This research presentation follows a practical experiment around the reception and consumption of the ‘spectacular’ Indian classical dancing body. The body and dance of the Indian classical performer was reconstructed in the early twentieth century as an anti-colonial and nationalist act of preserving lost heritage (Meduri, 2005; O’Shea, 2007). In the Indian nation building process, the return to a pre- colonial past that somehow survived the horror and pestilence of colonialism led to the revival and reform of several indigenous dance forms (Srinivasan, 1985) which even today continue to be marketed as ‘spiritual’ or ‘ritual’ dance forms that transcend matter or flesh. Questioning and critiquing this incessant emphasis on divinity and transcendence, this paper examines the material body of the Indian classical dancer as a space that is continually bounded by Indian nationalist and Euro-American orientalist discourses.

The paper reflects on the 2013 walking experience of my invented avatar, Devi (‘goddess’) the divine dancer, which was filmed on camera. As Devi walks the motorways and crowded streets of contemporary Kolkata, her silk-clad bejewelled body, painted face and ankle bells clash with the everyday reality of the bustling twenty-first century metropolis. Devi’s out of place spectacular body invites her viewers to engage in the juxtaposition and opposition of body, space and place. The paper draws on the feminist scholarship of Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Judith Butler (1999) to notice how resistance occurs from the inside out to create new meanings of and for bodies. Through Devi, I examine how the material body becomes a metaphor, providing a valuable tool for a feminist subversion of patriarchy. I investigate through my practice how bodies ‘are not inert; they function interactively and productively. They act and react. They generate what is new, surprising, unpredictable’ (Grosz, 1994: xi).

Prarthana Purkayastha is a performance practitioner, researcher and lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Plymouth University. Her research has been published in international journals such as Studies in South Asian Film and Media, Dance Research Journal and South Asia Research. Her forthcoming monograph titled

135 Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in September 2014.

Jayne Lloyd The aesthetic, sensory and social qualities of reminiscence arts practice with people with dementia who live in care homes

This paper explores the experience of the body that is confined to a care home environment. Through a comparison of the experience of walking outdoors with that of walking indoors in a care home setting, it investigates the differences between the sensory, spatial and aesthetic experiences of walking as an outdoor and indoor pursuit.

Taking walking as a physical act that connects the body to its environment and as a metaphor for virtual journeys undertaken in the memory or imagination, it questions the ways that arts practices can enable care home residents to experience things from outside their immediate physical surroundings, for example, from other places or times, as well as to interact with the care home environment itself.

The paper draws comparisons between artist Richard Long’s recreation in gallery spaces of walks he took in the countryside with methods arts practitioners use to evoke outdoor activities and environments in care homes. Focusing on how the spatial, sensory and aesthetic qualities of the experiences transfer between the outdoor and indoor landscapes, it questions how much and what type of information is needed to trigger a sense of an experience.

Jayne Lloyd is a second year PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, sponsored by Age Exchange Theatre Trust. Her practice-based PhD explores the relevance of reminiscence and inter-disciplinary arts practices (theatre, music, fine art and dance) to older people with dementia living in care homes. Jayne graduated from Byam Shaw, St Martin’s, University of the Arts London, with an MA in Fine Art in 2010. She is an installation artist who regularly exhibits and completes site- specific commissions and residencies both nationally and internationally. She has over 10 years’ experience in community engagement, development and facilitation roles working with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, age groups and with a range of learning needs.

136 Kate Marsh Displacing the disabled dancer in performance

In many ways, performers with disabilities are probably more aware of the stratification of the performance environment than non-disabled artists. Their entry and participation in professional performance both draws attention to the disabled body and provides the opportunity to challenge existing perceptions through the work they make. This presentation will focus on the current project by British/Australian dance artist, Caroline Bowditch, who is working with dancers and designers on a work that draws on the life and work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and combines dance, design, food and text to create a modular work that is designed for different theatrical contexts. The work, still in development, draws attention to the ways in which images (and particularly iconic images) transmit the somatic experience of disability, and how this can be re-embodied through dance. The process is providing Bowditch and her dancers with what seems to be information about their own somatic experience of physical impairment as source for the performance. The presentation is based on observations of rehearsals as part of the ‘InVisible Difference’ project that is focusing on the experience of disabled dance artists in relation to questions of ownership, authorship and copyright, so will also reference this broader context for the discussion.

Kate Marsh is a dance artist and teacher and has worked in a variety of settings both in the U.K and internationally, including as an associate artist for Candoco Dance Company, a freelance artist practitioner for DancEast, Dance4 Graeae Theatre Company and Scarabeus Aerial Theatre company. Recent performance work has included Prometheus Awakens (Graeae), Floor of the Forest, Set and Reset/Reset (Candoco) and the Paralympic closing ceremony. Kate’s doctoral research at Coventry University seeks to explore the shifting role of the disabled dance artist, focusing on the development of dancers with an impairment undertaking leading roles in the sector.

Lise Uytterhoeven Intersections between home, place and identity in La Zon-Mai by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Gilles Delmas

La Zon-Mai (2007), a multimedia installation by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and film-maker Gilles Delmas, is shaped as an inside-out house, an inversion encapsulated in its title by the reversal of the syllables of the French word for ‘house’. Walking around the installation in the museum or gallery

137 space, the spectator encounters intimate films of solo dancers in their homes, projected from the inside out onto the wall surfaces. It was conceived to be placed at the centre of the Festival Hall of the Palais de la Port Dorée in Paris, a room adorned with colonial frescoes depicting the radiation of French culture across the world. Aided by postcolonial perspectives on representations of ‘home’ in literature (George, 1999) and their implications for the construct of the nation and nationalism, La Zon-Mai is read as a postcolonial critique of conceptions of the world according to notions of centre and periphery. La Zon- Mai was commissioned by the Cité National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration to serve as its nomadic ambassador as it travelled to other spaces. This sense of the nomadic resonates with Cherkaoui’s dance collaborators shown in the film projections, whose affective, post-Fordist and transnational dance labour is mobilised by Cherkaoui and Delmas against the idea of nation and empire. Cherkaoui is interested in working with these particular dancers because they have a destabilised sense of self due to a mixed cultural background or due to migration. In other words, these artists are aware of the ‘contact zones’, or ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’ (Pratt, 2007, p.7), both in cultural exchange with others and within themselves. In the films, the dancers engage in poetic choreographic explorations of their homes and are represented on screen with an ethnographic sensibility as agents in the subversion of Eurocentrism.

Lise Uytterhoeven is Senior Lecturer at London Studio Centre, where she teaches dance and performance history, theory and analysis. She holds a BA in Dance in Education from Codarts and an MA in Dance Studies from the University of Surrey. She completed her PhD at Surrey in 2013, funded by the AHRC, on new dramaturgies in the work of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Lise is co-curator of the Choreographic Forum of the Society for Dance Research. She has published articles in journals, including Contemporary Theatre Review. From 2010 to 2013 she served on the editorial board of Platform: Postgraduate eJournal of Theatre & Performing Arts.

James Frieze is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Liverpool John Moores University, where his teaching areas include improvisation, devising and contemporary performance and his directing includes site-responsive, theatrical adaptations of non-dramatic texts. Author of Naming Theatre: Demonstrative Diagnosis in Performance (Palgrave, 2009), he is currently writing a monograph about the obsession with evidence in contemporary performance and editing a collection-in- progress on the framing of immersive and participatory theatre and performance.

Lib Taylor is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Reading. She has published on the body in performance, women’s theatre and contemporary British

138 theatre and performance. She has also written on the boundaries of the perceptions of performance. She is a theatre director and devisor of research performances, including recent stagings of Marguerite Duras’s Eden Cinema and Savannah Bay and the theatre writings of Gertrude Stein. She was co-investigator on the AHRC funded project, Acting with Facts: Performing The Real On Stage And Screen 1990-2010 and has published on the politics of verbatim theatre.

139 Performance, Identity, and Community Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Liz Tomlin I am not We: Ideological assumptions of ‘community’ in contemporary audience misrecognition

There is an increasing trend in contemporary performance for performers to adopt intentionally pseudo-authentic personae that are designed to be read by the audience as self-critique on the part of the artists – examples would include Tim Crouch’s The Author, Paper Birds In a Thousand Pieces and Others, and Made in China’s Gym Party. The audience in the above examples is placed in role as complicit with these personae, to enable it to laugh at itself and hold itself up the same self-critique the performers are exercising.

Such pieces universalise what are, in fact, specifically neo-liberal values and position their audiences as part of the ‘community which is all of us’: one that is secretly guilty of enjoying the humiliation of people desperate to win game shows, privately prepared to betray those they love for their own ends and eager to exploit others’ tragedy for their own gain. For those audience members who do not share the now pervasive value systems of bourgeois capitalism - that is the primacy of meritocracy, competition, and individual aspiration over the socialist notions of community - there is little to be gained from such performances, despite their Brechtian objectives.

My practice-based research project consequently explores a different strategy to achieve a self-critical response on the part of the audience. Rather than positioning the audience as one morally reprehensible community, enabling those who feel they are to laugh at themselves, and those who feel alienated (in a non-Brechtian sense) to remain outside of the critique altogether, The Cassandra Commission aims to position the audience as the ideal resistance to the neo-liberal status quo, with the performer in a confessional role as one who has failed to live up to her own aspirations. In this way, the strategy is to enable the audience to individually ask themselves what the gap might be for them between the ideal role they are being placed in, and the reality of their

140 own ideological actions. Ironically, perhaps, this reverses traditional notions of community and individualism as in this instance the politicised individual is freed from the dictates of the neo-liberalist community.

Liz Tomlin is currently senior lecturer in drama at the University of Birmingham. Her latest monograph Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory was published by Manchester University Press in 2013, and she is currently editing the third and final volume (1995-2013) in the Methuen series British Theatre Companies. Her most recent piece of professional practice was The Pool Game which was produced by the collective Geiger Counter in 2012, and she is currently developing a spoken word performance, The Cassandra Commission.

Marissia Fragkou ‘A glimpse into some other world’: Stan’s Cafe’s (class) politics

In response to the working group’s provocation ‘does class still matter in the theatre’ and in the spirit of Stuart Hall’s legacy, this paper will set out to examine the (class) politics of the Birmingham-based theatre company Stan’s Cafe. For more than two decades, the company has been producing experimental - and often socially engaged - work, asking questions about survival, risk, globalization, class and ecology. These questions are further made palpable through the group’s diverse and consciously anti-realist artistic approaches, DIY aesthetic and its drive to ‘promot[e] the possibility of alternative ways of looking at the world and alternative value systems’ (Yarker, 2008). The aim of this paper is twofold: to examine the ways in which Stan’s Cafe’s diverse stylistic vocabularies negotiate class and community politics and intervene in dominant naturalizing representational practices and; to interrogate the extent to which their working and artistic remits resist the neoliberal marketization of art. I will be specifically focussing on case studies from the company’s artistic portfolio such as Home of the Wriggler (2006), The Just Price of Flowers (2009) and the performance installation Of All the People in All the World (2003) while also placing Stan’s Cafe’s work within its material contexts and working ethics ultimately asking to what extend the theatre can offer ‘a glimpse into some other world’.

Dr Marissia Fragkou is lecturer in Performing Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her current research focuses on questions around responsibility, precarity and citizenship in contemporary performance. She has published articles in Contemporary Theatre Review and Performing Ethos and contributed chapters to Contemporary British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream, vol.3, (Methuen, forthcoming), Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance:

141 Inside/Outside Europe (Palgrave, forthcoming) and Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground (Palgrave, 2013).

Trish Reid Caledonian Dreaming: The Performance of a Different Scotland in Keiran Hurley’s Rantin

The establishment of a devolved Scottish parliament in 1999 altered Scotland’s understanding of and relationship to government; brought decision-making closer; and encouraged a more immediate sense of civic responsibility and empowerment on the part of the Scottish people. Devolution had a number of unforeseen consequences, certainly from the perspective of the New Labour administration that set it in motion with the referendum of 1997. Not least of these has been the transformation of the SNP from a minority party largely peopled by volunteers, to a mainstream force in the governance of Scotland. Consequently – in the run up to the independence referendum in September 2014 – the questions posed by Stuart Hall in ‘Who Needs Identity?’ seem extraordinarily live in contemporary Scotland. This paper will explore the ways in which Hall’s writing can inform our understanding of Keiran Hurley’s recent state-of-the-nation ceilidh play Rantin (2013). Rantin depicts a Scotland denuded of some of its most cherished myths, of the protective clothing that all nationalist movements love to wear. Just as bravely, however, Rantin is not ashamed of that nakedness. Hurley’s vision is as hopeful as it is satirical and unflinching, as full of possibilities as it is empty of fantasy. It evidences a shift in how young theatre makers understand and participate in the dynamic processes of Scottish national identity.

Trish Reid is Associate Professor of Drama at Kingston University. Her recent publications include ‘Post- Devolutionary Drama’, in Ian Brown ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Drama (Edinburgh University Press 2011); ‘Anthony Neilson’ in Aleks Sierz, Modern British Playwriting the 1990s (Methuen 2012); Theatre & Scotland (Palgrave 2013) and ‘Angels and Modern Myth: Grid Iron and the New Scottish Theatre’ in Patrick Duggan and Victor Ukaegbu eds., Reverberations Across Small-scale British Theatre (Intellect 2013). Trish is currently working on a longer monograph for Palgrave on contemporary Scottish theatre and on The Theatre of Anthony Neilson for Methuen.

142 Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Matt Hargrave Getting Both Things Right: Revisiting Stuart Hall and the politics of representation in relation to the Unlimited Festival

1987: an exchange between Stuart Hall and Salman Rushdie (the ‘Handsworth Letters’) neatly summarises the tensions inherent in critiquing new vulnerable aesthetic forms. 2012: twelve films by disabled artists collectively called Push Me, promote performance work commissioned by the disability focused Unlimited Festival. Twenty-five years separates these events; yet much can be gained by investigating the common threads that underpin them; by shuttling back and forth not just between Push Me and Black Audio but between Hall’s work on ‘new ethnicities’ and more recent ‘post-critical’ theories of performance, disability and identity. This paper addresses what is at stake in performance, given the refocusing of the Arts Council’s diversity policy (‘The Creative Case’ 2012) and the concurrent fragmentation of the ‘disability arts community’. It revisits Hall’s tentative first steps in naming the ‘politics of representation’ (critical, shifting, perpetually re-positioning) as distinct from the ‘burden of representation’ (essential and fixed black/white subjects); which would resonate over twenty years later as disabled artists, whose work was commissioned for Unlimited, faced what Hall earlier called leaving ‘the age of critical innocence’ (1988: 10). As one artist reflected, ‘There is no retreat from this, I cannot make tiny, unimportant work in a shed anymore’, and as her producer echoed, ‘Having seen the quality of the work, you cannot go back to a position where you think that it is all a bit crap’ (Int., DA online 2012). These questions of aesthetic judgement are precisely those Hall engaged in from ‘inside a continuous struggle and politics around black representation’; and which he was at pains to admit were ‘extremely tricky’ because the ‘mode’ of address was as important as the particularity of the judgement itself (1988: 10). As Hall concluded, the job of criticism is to ‘get both things right’, a challenge that is evoked again by the Unlimited commissions. The paper interrogates the notion of a ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ mode of address when critiquing work, hitherto marginalised, that is suddenly spotlighted in a mainstream context.

Dr Matt Hargrave is a Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts, Northumbria University specialising in Applied Theatre and Drama. As a writer and theatre practitioner he has worked with many leading theatres and cultural providers including: Northern

143 Stage, Mind the Gap, National Association of Youth Theatres, Helix Arts, and Arts Council England. His major research interest is the performance and representation of cognitive difference: his bookA Poetics of the Theatres of Learning Disability will be published with Palgrave this year.

Eleanor Massie Amateur-Professional Mimicry and Memories of Blackface

While recent publications have recuperated the term amateur within the vocabulary of critical practice (Bailes, 2011; Ridout, 2013) or explored the traditions of amateur theatre in the UK (Cochrane, 2011; Dobson, 2011), this paper argues we must go further and acknowledge that each time a production is labelled professional or amateur a nexus of power relations is brought to bear upon the performance. These power relations construct performers’ identities and generate divisions within performance communities. By exploring the socio-historical associations of individual moments within performances, a sometimes surprising genealogy of power relations can be exposed, including class and racial divides. This paper will consider how attitudes towards blackface performance in the US during the 19th and early 20th century may provide one such genealogy for the terms amateur and professional in contemporary UK performance. To do so, it analyses two productions from 2013: The Scottsboro Boys at the Young Vic (London) and Our Town at the Queen Mother Theatre (Hitchin), home to amateur dramatics group Big Spirit. These two performances represent points on a triangle of exchange between amateur organisations, professionalising institutions and professional performance. They also reveal a recurrent concern with racial mimicry. This paper proposes that, in certain instances, racial mimicry parallels mimetic processes through which performers assert their status on an amateur-professional spectrum. It also considers moments where such mimicry breaks itself, through its own functions of copying and reproducing, and the consequence this has for racial and performance statuses co-constructed through that representation.

Eleanor Massie: I am in the first year of an AHRC funded PhD in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University, supervised by Dr Nicholas Ridout. Prior to that I read an MA in Text and Performance at RADA and Birkbeck and a BA (Hons) in English Literature at Cambridge. I am also a solo artist and cofounder of performance duo, SHATTER RESISTANT. I recently presented a paper on my research at the TaPRA PGR ‘Missing Performance’ symposium.

144 Jo Ronan In Conversation with Fatima Rateb

This presentation is inspired by the question, “does performance offer ways to reconfigure the competing claims of difference and equality?” and takes the form of performance, lecture and interview.

I founded BloodWater Theatre (BWT) www.bloodwatertheatre.com to challenge assumptions of economic and cultural ownership of theatre processes and products. BWT experiments with multiple identities of self, and staged self via character, with the audience experiencing both, in the course of the performance. We bring in characters from different parts of the world into the rehearsal room although our residential identities are localised to the UK. The motivation for this is to share multiple stories born out of different cultural and ethnic origins in one setting so that stories that are not often heard in this setting can be heard. BWT comprises of three women - four men - two East Indians (Scottish and Singaporean) – four White Scottish – one White Polish. Our rehearsal pedagogy is premised on Bial’s theory of double coding where “what works for one audience on a universal level works for another audience specifically”.

Whilst the ethics of representation is troubling, the desire to address the “supposed crisis of multiculturalism” necessitates an engagement with representation. During the course of my presentation, I will do a three minute monologue in the character of Fatima Rateb from the recently staged, Leave Your Shoes at the Door by BWT. I will invite the audience to ask questions of Fatima following that after which I will contextualise the presentation as Jo and finally invite the audience to ask questions of Jo.

Jo Ronan is programme leader for Performance at UWS. She is a practice-based researcher undertaking doctoral research at the RCSSD on collaborative modes of theatre-making in a capitalist economy. Her areas of research include devising, training models and participatory performance. She was Associate Director with 7:84 (Scotland) directing, Eclipse by Haresh Sharma which toured Scotland and Singapore and The Algebra of Freedom by Raman Mundair, inspired by the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Jo pioneered new writing in Singapore, co-founding The Necessary Stage Theatre Company in 1987 and was its associate director till 1994 when she settled in Scotland.

145 Panel Sessions 1 Thursday 4th September 11.30-1.00pm

Adam Alston The Politics of Paradise: The Living Theatre, the New Left and the New Spirit of Capitalism

According to Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ has affected the makeup of late-twentieth century and contemporary workplace environments, relationships and communities: workplaces are decentralised and networked; workplace relationships are re-engineered to accommodate worker autonomy; and responsibility is no longer the prerogative of the foreman, but of the individual worker. For these authors, the new spirit of capitalism draws strength from incorporating critiques of capitalism, including those arising from the New Left and the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. However, the process of incorporation is highly selective. For New Left theorists, activists and artists operating in the 1960s and 70s, the task at hand was not just to promote individual autonomy (which the new spirit of capitalism demands), but community and interdependence as well. In this paper, I will unpack how the relationships between autonomy and community were envisaged by the New Left by exploring a canonical experiment in countercultural theatre practice that was deeply imbued with New Left political ideology: the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now. While Paradise Now has been rightly criticised as a ‘quasi-fascist’ performance (Kershaw), negating its revolutionary ambitions, I argue that the social anarchism informing the project, from a New Left perspective, is pertinent to the contemporary moment. Drawing on the international student movement and the early British New Left, especially Stuart Hall, I argue that, despite its failures, we would do well to revisit New Left political and countercultural experimentation if we are to learn more about their basterdised appropriation.

Adam Alston is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Surrey. He has published (and forthcoming) articles and chapters on audience participation in numerous journals and books, including Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review and Studies in Theatre and Performance. He is currently part of a small editorial team for Contemporary Theatre Review’s new website and is also a Creative Associate with the devised theatre company, Curious Directive.

146 Hannah Cummings At Stake: Fun, Games and Democracy in ‘Fight Night’ and ‘The Great Spavaldos’

Fight Night, by Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed, is a performance that asks audience members to vote for their ‘ideal candidate’ throughout a series of rounds in which the five contestants are narrowed down to one. The performance offers a consideration of the limitations of the democratic, electoral system and has, therefore, been programmed in various locations around the world in an attempt to raise topical questions about the forms that democracy can take. At stake, is the evolution of democracy.

The Great Spavaldos, by Il Pixo Rosso, is a performance for two audience members at a time. The audience members are fitted with virtual goggles that immerse them within the world of the circus. Effectively blinded to the space that they actually inhabit, the audience members must concede control in order to be led on a journey that allows them to experience the fear and excitement of performing in a trapeze act, despite being aware of the contrivance of the situation. At stake, is an enlivening experience.

This paper takes as its inspiration the question ‘what’s at stake in performance?’ with a secondary consideration of the various ways in which performance can come to matter. These questions are explored through a discussion of the tension between the two outlined performances, one that offers a direct mediation on a political subject and one that thrilled and delighted. Ultimately, the paper offers the provocation that the question of stakes in performance might unfairly belittle the idea of entertainment, for entertainments sake and, anyway, is there such a thing?

Hannah Cummings is a third year AHRC-funded doctoral student at the University of Exeter. Hannah’s research focuses on audience participation in contemporary theatre and performance, considering the political potential of participatory performance and the extent to which these performance practices pose a challenge to Guy Debord’s notion of ‘spectacular’ society. Her research offers an overview of the contemporary moment exploring questions surrounding social responsibility, authenticity, mediatisation and competitive capitalism. Hannah recently organised and hosted Exeter’s inaugural postgraduate and early career researcher conference entitled ‘Obligations in Contemporary Theatre and Performance Practices’.

147 Philip Hager ‘The truth must be spoken to stop this bullshit’ (provocation paper)

My departure point is Athens in 2014, where (as elsewhere in Europe) a politics of violence is more and more evident as the economic crisis unfolds: not only has a neo-nazi party, Golden Dawn, gained parliamentary representation and widened its ‘interventions’ throughout the city, but also the practices and rhetoric of an increasingly authoritarian government seem to further legitimise fascism. The advocates of common sense in the (mainstream) media would not object to a ‘more serious Golden Dawn’ becoming part of a coalition government ‘as is the case in a number of other European countries’ (Papadimitriou 2013), while they consistently fail to recognise the violence of a state that sinks deeper into the normality of exclusion, xenophobia and injustice. Becoming a rhinoceros is normal in a world where fascism has become a legitimate choice.

In 2014 the Athenian audience had the chance to watch Peter Weiss’ The Investigation and Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. These two productions, along with the recent independent documentary film Fascism Inc. (that was launched in April 2014), offer a critique of fascism both as a political practice and a process of subjectivation, while explicating its ties with capitalism. Drawing on these examples, this provocation seeks to raise questions related to the current rise of fascism in Europe and its gradual naturalisation (both on the level of EU policies and in various nation-states around the continent) as well as ponder on the role of theatre and performance in resisting the politics of violence.

Dr. Philip Hager is Associate Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London. His work examines the politics of theatre and performance in post-war and contemporary Europe and has published work on performances and spectacles of citizenship and democracy in contemporary urban settings. He is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Performances of Crises, Capitalism and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe (Palgrave 2015) and is co-convenor of the ‘Inside/Outside Europe’ research network.

Gareth White Participatory theatre and democracy effects (provocation paper)

In this short provocation I ask whether contemporary participatory theatre is ever more than a symptom of the crisis of democracy: merely an expression of a false democratic identity, a democracy effect.

148 Theatre, especially participatory theatre, can be democratic in its form and its content. It can be constituted of free expression and productive antagonism; it can recognise and hear the voices of the people. But beyond the democratic microcosm of the theatre, in the macro, formal democracy is in crisis, the most significant voting block made up of those who don’t bother.

In everyday life our agency is celebrated. Continually asked for feedback, offered personalised and responsive interfaces, invited to participate, we are spoiled: meanwhile democratic discourse is impoverished.

The turn towards participatory theatre for entertainment, the experimental interrogation of audience initiative, and the fora of applied theatre all model democracy, but also engage democracy effects. A democracy effect in this context occurs, I propose, when one is recognised as having a part to play, but what is played is only a simulacrum of that part. It may have the quality, affect or appearance of democracy, but it is no such thing.

Social media create the paradigm of democracy effects; participatory theatre follows in their wake.

Gareth White is Senior Lecturer in Applied Theatre and Community Performance, at Central School of Speech and Drama. His research is concerned with the aesthetics of participation, in a variety of settings and senses. Recently this has centred on audience participation in contemporary practices from applied performance to live art to immersive theatre; while forthcoming publications explore the aesthetic aspects of longer-term participatory practices. Publications include Applied Theatre: Aesthetics (scheduled for 2015) and Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation, 2013.

Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

Kerrie Schaefer Islands of Milwaukee: a critical analysis of performance in a structurally segregated city

This presentation explores a creative development process co-led by UWM’s Professor Anne Basting (renowned scholar-practitioner on performing aging in the USA and working beyond memory with dementia) and Sojourn Theatre. 149 Islands of Milwaukee is the name of the larger community partnership project which aims, through creative/performance practice, to connect homebound senior citizens in the county of Milwaukee with ‘community’, and to engage ‘community’ with the city’s homebound elders. The Crossings, May 1 and 2, 2014, are devised, site-specific, community performances on three street crossings in the county of MKE. The crossings are close to residential sites for older adults and were chosen by South Shore Caring Communities Centre (SSCCC), a key project partner. At these street crossings UWM students, Sojourn practitioners, older adults, ‘specials’ (city mayors, govt. reps, city engineers, fire chiefs, police) and others (e.g. school, church groups) will performatively enact crossing the street (with the lights) to encourage MKE drivers to ‘see and stop’ for pedestrians. I aim to move beyond analysis of how The Crossings performances might make MKE a place that sees and stops for pedestrians, or might connect communities across inter-generational divides and modes of bounded-ness/mobility. Critical attention (informed by relevant theory) will focus on performative enactment (devised, site-specific, community-based) and the un-working of symbolic and material structural relations between (sub-)urban spatialities (‘white flight’ and racial segregation), cultural identities (class, race, and age) and (public/private) power (building roads over public transportation systems).

Dr Kerrie Schaefer is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter. This research is funded by British Academy/Leverhulme small grant and is connected to a larger AHRC Fellowship-funded project entitled ‘Enacting Community’ which is working on theorising ‘inoperative community’ (via Nancy and cultural geographers such as Gibson-Graham, Rose) in relation to community performance practices. This work will be published in a forthcoming monograph with Palgrave Macmillan.

Nicky Hatton Personal taste and identity in the care home ‘community’: implications for theatre practice

The tension between identity and community is particularly significant in a care home where individuals from a diverse range of age groups, social and cultural backgrounds live together in the same space. Residents who may not have socialised in other situations find themselves in increased social contact, often encountering the same people repeatedly in communal spaces. Personal taste takes on greater significance in this context. The opportunity to meet people with similar tastes can promote sociability, but it can also emphasise cultural and social differences. This is reinforced by the limited menu of cultural activities available to people living in care homes. The relationship between personal taste and identity troubles the (already problematic) notion of

150 ‘community’ in a care home and has implications for theatre artists working in these settings. This paper explores the significance of personal taste in relation to participatory theatre in care settings. Drawing on a recent theatre and sound project, it explores the relationship between the personal tastes of the residents and the culture of participation in the workshops. I use Omar Lizardo’s study of cultural capital and social networks (2006) to explore how the diverse tastes of the residents shaped the project, and to address some of the broader questions that emerged about doing theatre in care homes. I suggest that participation in arts activities can be a means of validating personal identity and creating new social networks within a care home. Equally, the decision to ‘opt out’ of these activities can be a meaningful expression of individuality in a community with limited opportunities for autonomy and choice.

Nicky Hatton is a participatory theatre practitioner who works predominantly in health and care settings. She completed her MA in Applied Theatre in 2008 and since then has run theatre projects in community, health and education settings in London and the North West. In 2013 she was awarded the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship to research theatre and dementia in Canada and the United States. Nicky is currently an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London where she is researching theatre in care homes, with a focus on creative responses to care homes spaces.

Natalie Lee Performing Home - Creating new representations of social housing through performance

This paper presentation will consider the possibilities of performance as a way of interacting in the debate relating to social housing in the UK. It will discuss issues of class, community and identity, specifically notions of belonging and (dis) placement, how our social housing provision and its residents are represented and how performance may participate in forming new representations.

The stigma attached to council estates is enormous. Those living in these properties or claiming housing benefits are chastised and viewed as an unpleasant underclass. This is something that is insidiously nurtured by our government and our media. Housing is a hot topic and we see countless television programmes with audacious, provocative titles such as Benefits Street, The Big Benefits Row, How To Get A Council House and On Benefits And Proud bursting on to our screens, engaging in the debate. Elaborating on Hall’s theories of coding and cultural representation, the paper will examine how our media is propagating this stigma and will explore the potentialities of performance as response to 151 this - a show of varied lived experience, an attempt to provide an alternative to the biased perception of social housing that exists in our society.

Drawing on my work, Estate, a performance storytelling of the council area I grew up on, the paper will explore and consider the difficulties of this representation, problematising the notion of community, especially when existing as a formed or imposed construct, discussing if and how this could in fact lead to further marginalisation and condemnation.

Natalie Lee: I am currently a first year PhD student at The University of Hull in the Department of Drama. Previously, I completed my undergraduate degree at Staffordshire University and went on to achieve my masters degree from Liverpool Hope University. My research is concerned with contemporary arts practice and its applications within the field of social housing and regeneration, specifically relating to the notion of home. My performance practice specialises in installation art and solo performance exploring themes of housing, identity and our relationship with our living space.

Working Groups Session 4 & Business Meeting Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Elizabeth Bennett Souterrain: A journey underground in the Sussex landscape

My research focuses on imaginative and non-traditional geographies as valid ways of perceiving our identity in relation to the landscape. Through a discussion of WildWorks theatre company’s production of Souterrain, a retelling of the Orpheus myth, I intend to elucidate the web of perception that the stories we tell weave into our experience of certain landscapes and influence notions of belonging; how contemporary outdoor theatre companies employ these elements in their performances; and how such performances can create temporary communities, contribute to existing ones, and leave traces on the sites of their production. In this paper I propose to argue for the reciprocal relationship between landscape and mind. A landscape once known and loved becomes part our spirit and we carry it with us in absentia, in return we leave our trace on the spirit of the landscape through storytelling, an inherited notion of being-in-the-world that exists via an oral tradition of recalling how others

152 have their lives in our communities of location. Considering myth as a source of inspiration for contemporary large-scale outdoor performance, and as a suitable narrative vehicle for tales of the epic and the intimate, the personal and the communal, this paper seeks to explore C.S Lewis’s statement that: ‘The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by “the veil of familiarity”… If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror’ (Lewis 2000: pp. 254-255).

Elizabeth Bennett is an AHRC funded PHD student at Royal Holloway Drama and Theatre Department being supervised by Professor Helen Nicholson. Her doctoral thesis ‘Performing Landscapes’ examines contemporary British large-scale outdoor theatre and aims to theorize landscape as a performative concept. Following recent developments in cultural geography and landscape writing, Elizabeth positions her research in relation to biography, movement, affect, and absence. ‘Souterrain: A journey underground in the Sussex landscape’ explores the relationship between imagination, landscapes, collective memory, and communities of location.

Sarah Mullan Bread and Circuses: the politics of claiming identity

The publicity forPuffball (2014) asserted that it would be ‘a deeply personal show devised and performed by world class circus artists and a young cast, all of whom identify as LGBTQ’ (‘What’s On’, Roundhouse). This claim to represent a community largely invisible in mainstream performance is one that can be nothing but political. While LGBT performance is often cited as an example of ‘identity-based’ work the stylised, circus format of Puffball rendered sexual identity largely invisible. Performing LGBT identity is still a significant and contested act, but purporting to represent these identities without apparently doing so is far more problematic.

This paper, then, is interested in the expectations that surround representation on stage. Through an analysis of the vignettes within Puffball, this paper will interrogate the difficulties of representing sexual identity, particularly in relation to visibility. By foregrounding the political nature of representing identity, the paper intends to consider what is at stake in producing work that does not necessarily ‘read’ as LGBT.

Sarah Mullan is in her second year of a College funded PhD in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. Her thesis considers the interplay between contemporary lesbian performance and queer epistemologies.

153 Emma Miles Small rebellions: Age related power and Theatre for Early Years audiences

Since the publication of Jacqueline Rose’s The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction in 1984, children’s literature scholarship has questioned the power relations between adult authors and child readers. Maria Nikolajeva, in 2010, coined the term ‘aetonormativity’ to refer to the adult norms replete in literature for children. Meanwhile, academic thought in Theatre for Young audiences (TYA), as a far younger branch of both theatre and children’s culture scholarship, has been concerned with defending the artistry of the genre against assumptions that its priorities might be to educate. Both, then, question the adult behind the art form, and the instrumentalism imagined as inherent in cultural work produced for children. Referencing Polka Theatre’s adaptation of Anthony Browne’s picture book Gorilla, aimed at children aged 2 to 4, this paper will examine how age related roles may be explored and questioned in a Theatre for Early Years audiences (TEY) production. Using Clementine Beauvais’ theory of temporality’s role in notions of aetonormativity, it will ask how the distribution of power between adult and child may be interpreted in this performance, and how didacticism may be rejected or reconceptualised. It will go on to explore how interaction may draw the audience into complicity with the child protagonist, acknowledging the very particular quality of aesthetic distance in live art for children so young, as well as the consequent implications for this discussion of adult/child power dynamics. Thus this paper will posit that TEY, albeit for the youngest of audiences, has the potential to question hegemony, in this instance via age related identity politics.

Emma Miles is studying for a PhD in the department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, supervised by Professor Helen Nicholson. Her ethnographic research surrounding Theatre for Early Years audiences (TEY) looks to explore the theatre event from the child’s perspective, as well as tracing an intersection between TEY and pedagogy. She previously worked for several years with children in formal and informal educational settings, before becoming an infant school classroom teacher.

154 Popular Performance Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Marco Valleriani Harlequin: Tradition and Innovation

The paper will seek to analyse how the standard character Harlequin has been enacted in popular and political performance. Within the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte, similarities, tradition, and/or innovation in techniques, gestures and objectives of the performances will be considered.

Commedia dell’Arte was based on repertoire and performance practices very specific to each family of artists where one generation learned their techniques from the previous one. In a similar context innovations were not likely to happen, although different traditions have emerged. For instance, Alberto Naselli’s Harlequin in the 1500 or Martinelli’s one in the 1600 are exempla of this type of tradition. They present similarities and points of contact but also peculiar traits in relation to historical and geographical conditions.

In the twentieth century the rebel servant character of Harlequin has been charged with more political connotations between the traditional interpretation of Soleri and the revolutionary approach of Dario Fo. Consequently, our perception and understanding of the role of Harlequin has changed too. The paper will attempt to trace an iconographical history and analysis of contemporary performance practices in contrast with the established tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte.

Dr Marco Valleriani has specialized in theatre, cinema, and other mass media and their political implications within modern society. He has analyzed the art of storytelling and the iconography of gesture that the Nobel laureate Dario Fo finds and takes from the sacred paintings of Medieval and Renaissance painters. His research interests address the reciprocal contamination between theatre and visual arts, in particular the relevance of iconography and gesture in popular performance.

155 Louise Peacock Pulcinella and Punch: Players and Puppets

This paper will explore the history and development of the masked character of Pulcinella in Commedia dell’arte and of the marionette and glove puppet Pulcinellas in Italy. Alongside it will consider the way in which Pulcinella travelled across the channel in each of his guises becoming Punchinello and, ultimately, Mr Punch. Although he may have visited England as a live performer, he settled first as a marionette and then, enduringly, as a glove puppet. From this historical background the paper explores Pulcinella and Punch as key examples of popular performance in both Italy and England by drawing on scripts and scenarios of commedia and puppet shows together with analysis of more contemporary shows. This analysis focuses on the parallels to between live and puppet performance, between Italian and English performance, between Early Modern and Contemporary performance with an emphasis on cultural and social specificity, objectification (through mask, puppet and swazzle), double acts and slapstick violence. It considers the points of difference or departure between the various forms, establishing who Pulcinella and Punch were, what they did, the ways in which they echo each other and the ways in which the two have developed separate lives. I will endeavour to identify the points and means of transmission from one performance mode to another in order to trace just how the live Pulcinella became a puppet performer and how that puppet performer became anglicised whilst retaining enough of his Italian forebear to be identified with him.

Louise Peacock is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Practice at the University of Hull where she teaches courses in clown, commedia dell’arte and farce. She is the author of Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance (Intellect, 2009) and Slapstick and Comic Performance: Comedy and Pain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her next project, British Stage Comedy 1965 – 2015, is due for publication by Palgrave in 2017. She has written articles and given conference papers which explore stand-up comedy, commedia dell’arte and clowning. She is an associate researcher of the Centre for Comedy Studies at Brunel University and is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Comedy Studies.

156 Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Jon Davison Clown History Today

Victor Vladimirov, Director of the Moscow State College of Circus and Variety Arts, speaking at the 1993 World Clown Congress, asserted that:

In order to have any movement forward in clowning, you have to have a philosophy of clowning. In order to have a philosophy of clowning, you have to have a history of clowning.

This paper outlines some options open to us today for analysis, interpretation and writing of history of clowning. It begins with an overview of commonly found forms of clown history, the ‘monumental’ and the ‘anecdotal’, their aims and limitations. It then explores an approach to clown history placing clowns and clowning within social, political and historical contexts. How might such a perspective affect our understanding of widely differing historical manifestations of clowning as Shakespearean clowns, New Woman clowns of the 1890s, or issues of the genealogy of Pierrot, Clown or Auguste?

And how might such an examination affect how we interpret contemporary clowns and clowning, whose stories and histories have tended to be self-written, from Jacques Lecoq to Slava Polunin? Can mapping distant clown histories provide a model, methodology and indeed the courage to confront our own period and practices with a critical eye?

In conclusion, this paper argues for a critical and rigorous approach to clown history which demonstrates a healthy scepticism towards clown practitioners’ self-mythologising, guided by the clown historian Tristan Rémy’s observation, in Les Clowns, that ‘Clowns, notably, have a propensity to mystify’ (1945: 381).

Jon Davison has been a clown performer, teacher, director and writer for the last 30 years. He taught clown, improvisation and acting at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona from 1996-2006, and since 2006 he has been co-Director of Studies at the Escola de Clown de Barcelona. From 2007-2010 he was an AHRC-funded Creative Fellow investigating contemporary clown/actor training at Central School of Speech and Drama, where he is now Visiting Lecturer. Since 1993 he has performed as

157 part of Companyia d’Idiotes at festivals, theatres, tents, streets and bars throughout Europe. His first book, ‘Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice’ was published in 2013 by Palgrave Macmillan, for whom he is now finalising a new work entitled ‘Clown Training’, due out later this year.

Maggie Irving Inspired by Dadaist Baroness Elsa: Clown Sedusa paves new pathways for clowning

My clowning and choice of locations to clown is inspired by the little known early-twentieth century avant-garde artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven (1874-1927), who in keeping with clowning antics of fellow Dada artists, interrupted cultural and social norms. Baroness Elsa’s antics included wearing outlandish costumes, such as attending the French consulate wearing a birthday cake on her head. Rebellious ‘manic clowning’ became one aspect of Dada, and was a type of aggressiveness that sprang, as Werner Haftmann notes, ‘from a sensation of total freedom’ (Haftmann in Richter, 1964).

Clowns enjoy freedom from restraint. This paper illustrates the clowning antics and politics of a twenty-first century clown who is influenced by the incursions into the quotidian that Baroness Elsa achieved. My clown character Sedusa, who is inspired by Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Myth of The Medusa,’ is situated on the borders of gender/social norms and uses devised and improvised performance, physicality, costuming and action to transgress both social and clowning norms. Sedusa’s choice of performance spaces pays tribute to Baroness Elsa’s practices and influences. In Ssssseconds with Sedusa, on 17th December 2012 this clown strove to undo “truths” by employing disruptive behaviour in everyday places including an office; a lift and revolving door at Plymouth University; the shopping concourse; Toni & Guy hairdressers and on The Big Screen. Sedusa offers a mode of clowning and mask that crosses traditional boundaries, while still evoking the carnival and aiming for carnivalesque laughter (Bakhtin, 1984).

Maggie Irving has completed an AHRC funded Practice as Research Ph.D at The University of Plymouth. Inspired by the early twentieth century avant garde artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Maggie has performed in a variety of non- theatre locations including, The Tate Modern London, The Manchester Art Gallery and The Royal Mile, Edinburgh. Her clown training began at The University of Plymouth and she has extended her knowledge and practice through further training

158 with Philippe Gaulier, John Wright, and Keith Johnstone. She now teaches clowning both in educational and non-educational settings and proposes new approaches to clowning for women and men.

Barnaby King “Que se vaya el payaso”: routines of vulgarity in Colombian circus clowning

Despite the decline of the traditional circus in Latin America, a resilient core of small, family-based troupes as well as larger, more commercial big-tops continue to tour successfully throughout Colombia. Unlike the growing contemporary circus movement, marketed mainly to an emergent Colombian middle class elite, the traditional circuses identify with the ‘barrio popular’ (traditional working class neighbourhoods), where they mostly tour. The traditional circus ‘payaso’ (clown) revels in hyperactive hijinx, ambiguous sexual buffoonery and aggressive knock-about. Embraced as ‘of the people’ on one hand and rejected as ‘vulgar’ on the other, the ‘payaso’ seems to reinforce aspects of social stratification already prevalent in Colombia.

Based on six months of fieldwork with two Colombian circuses, this paper considers ways in which clowning transgresses boundaries (e.g. of class and taste) but also, at times, constructs and reifies them. Moving outwards from the performative moment, it also draws on interviews with performers and time spent behind the scenes, in order to deepen our understanding of how the circus itself shapes clown performance. More broadly still it suggests how neoliberal globalization in Latin America has impacted on the circuses and, by extension, the clown acts. Conversely it also enquires whether the clowns have the potential to evade these powerful social, cultural and economic constraints, or in some way resist the tendency of power to consume carnivalesque opposition?

Barnaby King is a performer, teacher, and researcher specializing in humor, clowning, and festive performance as they relate to political economies and social realities. His PhD, completed in 2013 at Northwestern University, revolved around clowning in Colombia as a transformative social practice. For eight years he worked as a professional director and facilitator of theatre for young audiences in Leeds and is founder of the “Clown Encuentro,” an annual international conference and festival of clowning held in Colombia. He is currently a lecturer in Performing Arts at Edge Hill University, UK.

159 Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

Panel Shared with Theatre History and Historiography

Adam Ainsworth The New Empire Theatre and the creation of suburban place

The aim of this paper is to explore ways in which geographical theory might be used to inform historical inquiry. The theoretical framework will not only be provided by phenomenological concepts of space and place but also that tradition of cultural geography concerned with the transformation of the environment by human activity. The image of a palimpsest is typically used to describe processes by which human intention inscribes itself on the landscape and in these terms a place can be defined not only as an aggregation of inscriptions, amendments and erasures over time, but also as a document of change, an historical source that can be analysed and interpreted.

The primary focus of this paper is a place located at what is currently 153-157 Clarence Street, Kingston upon Thames. Although between 1910 and 1955, the Empire Theatre was literally locatedin this place, culturally it was this place. For a considerable period of time prior to the building of the Empire however a large country house set within spacious orchards and belonging to prominent local family, the Roots, could be described in the same terms. As one feature was erased from the place, a new feature was inscribed upon it and both its symbolic properties and its cultural functions were altered as a consequence. This paper examines these alterations and speculates that the new variety theatre should be read as a symbol of a place inhabited by an increasingly modern, urban and middle class population experiencing significant cultural change.

Adam Ainsworth is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at Kingston University. He teaches the history, theory and practice of popular performance and both his teaching and his research interests are informed by a range of differing popular performance traditions. The main focus of his current research is Kingston’s Empire Theatre. Adam also convenes the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s Popular Performance Working Group.

160 Panel Sessions 2 Friday 5th September 10.00-11.30am

Claire Warden Tombstones and text: the presence and absence of audible language in professional wrestling

Historically the ‘squared circle’ (wrestling ring) has been a space of visceral expression, of extravagant bodies, in Nicholas Sammond’s terms, ‘awash in sweat, blood and spit’. However, increasingly, critics focus on the dramatic performances of the wrestlers, on their dialogue, interaction with audience and character development. This line of enquiry presents professional wrestling as a liminal mode, occupying a troublesome space between sport and theatre while consciously playing with various definitions of ‘performance’.

Following this trend, the paper uncovers the fraught relationship between physical performance and spoken text, the visceral gesturing of the actor- athletes and the myriad linguistic interruptions. In doing so it follows Roland Barthes’ lead in proclaiming pro-wrestling as worthy of study despite the irresolvable difficulties of definition and genre. The paper focuses on the outworking of scripted scenarios through the wrestlers’ bodies and identifies two textual intrusions into this predominantly corporeal space: the commentators’ narratives and the wrestlers’ ‘promos’. The final section of the paper builds on this to discuss the audience-initiated absence/silencing of the spoken word as a rebellious intervention. If read through this dialogue between the physical and the verbal, pro-wrestling takes on a surprisingly subversive role in contemporary sporting and artistic cultures. The overarching aim is to present pro-wrestling as a place of somatic and linguistic presence.

Dr Claire Warden is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan 2012) and Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an introduction (Edinburgh UP 2014). She is particularly interested in popular performance and the body from the movement innovations of the historical avant-garde to the visceral space of the professional wrestling ring. Her first publication on professional wrestling came out last year in Revue de Recherche en Civilisation Americaine and she is currently putting together a co-edited collection on pro-wrestling and performance

161 James McLaughlin The Censor Without, The Censor Within: The Resistance of Johnstone’s Improv to the Social and Political Pressures of 1950s Britain

Keith Johnstone’s improv, popularly known through the Theatresports format, was forged in the cultural and historical context of 1950s Britain. In this paper I will argue that Johnstone’s incarnation of theatrical improvisation was defined by its reaction to the normalising forces exerted by the social elite upon the broader population and by civilised society upon the individual.

Johnstone’s improv was a reaction against the censorship of the British stage and a challenge to the internalised ‘censor’ British society implanted in the minds of his students, stunting their creative imaginations. Johnstone borrowed elements of professional wrestling to break down the regimented conventions of the theatre space and enliven the spectator-performer relationship. Johnstone’s improv shares Rolland Barthes’ critique of the authority of the author and allows meaning to be generated out of the encounter between performers and spectators in the instant of the performance’s emergence. Through these processes, Johnstone’s improv defies the censor without (The Lord Chamberlain) by rooting out the censor within (the socially learnt inhibitions to the creative imagination).

This paper will demonstrate the emancipatory power latent in this mode of popular performance. This is a particularly timely analysis given the increasing authority of free market economics to dictate what appears on contemporary British stages and the internalised censor that panoptical CCTV and social media is implanting within the minds of British citizens today.

Dr. James McLaughlin is a Lecturer in Acting & Drama at the University of Northampton. He has fifteen years of professional improv experience, including participating in an improv masterclass with Keith Johnstone and winning the inaugural World Cage Match Championship at The Chicago Improv Festival. He was the founding Theatre Manager of New Zealand’s only improvised comedy theatre, the Covert Theatre. He is the author of ‘Why is Improv Funny? The Centrifugal Forces of Johnstonian Improv’, in Comedy Studies 4(1).

Simon Sladen Camp as Christmas? Exploring Effeminacy in Modern British Pantomime

In December 2013, the National Database of Pantomime Performance reported that only 10% of pantomimes that season cast a female Principal Boy, a marked

162 decrease from the dominance of the breeches role in Victorian pantomime. Although existing scholarship addresses the demise of the cross-dressed role in contemporary pantomime, little focus has been afforded to new interpretations of the role and the ways producers, writers and performers have re-distributed its characteristics to other stock pantomime characters.

This paper will explore the changing face of the genre’s stock roles, focusing primarily on the pantomime convention of cross-dressing and the Principal Boy and Dame, two characters to have experienced the greatest evolution since Victorian pantomime.

Key pantomime performers such as John Barrowman, Danny La Rue and Julian Clary will be addressed as this paper investigates how celebrity and performer sexuality have impacted and influenced the genre.

Roots and routes of influence will be plotted and historical lineage traced as I seek to establish how new interpretations of ‘traditional’ stock roles are created. I will argue that through the repetition and replication of practices and conventions, ‘new’ stock forms become an ‘accepted’ and anticipated part of the genre.

Simon Sladen is Assistant Curator, Modern and Contemporary Performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His research interests include modern British pantomime, its evolution since 1945 and the genre’s use of celebrity. He is Curator of the National Database of Pantomime Performance and Founder / Co-ordinator of National Panto Day.

Working Groups Session 4 & Business Meeting Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Caroline Astell-Burt The Pressing of Flesh - Otome Bunraku and Training for the Puppeteer today

In 1919 marking the death of Kaspar the folk Puppet. Hugo Ball’s nonsense Dada funeral ovation opened puppetry up to the whole world of the arts no longer limiting it to the families of folk puppetry passing their skills down from father to son and tied into the repertoire.

163 The disciplines of puppetry became the disciplines of whatever art-form the modernist puppeteer was already immersed. It was the time of the painter- puppeteer, the dancer-puppeteer, the sculptor-puppeteer, the singer-puppeteer etc.

I locate my discussion both inside my own practice as a puppeteer and inside the notion of a global Modernist body culture in which I root puppetry today “The pressing of flesh” of my title describes the haptic relationship of my body to objects I animate.

Utilising new knowledge, training today is to prepare the artist to challenge and destabilise fixed meanings in the tropes of traditional puppetry replacing them with the subjectivity of the puppeteer herself creating multiple puppet identities in performative events unique, insistent and scenographically vibrant.

Caroline Astell-Burt is a puppeteer and Director of Studies of the London School of Puppetry where with Ronnie Le Drew they established the first training course for professional puppeteers in the UK in 1991. Much of her work has involved the developments of techniques and theories for an education in puppetry. Her current research interest is in Otome-Bunraku.

Sophie Quirk Manipulation and the Dark Arts in Stand-up Comedy and Stage Magic

Magicians and alternative stand-up comedians engage in similar crafts. Both employ distraction and persuasion, using the strength of the performance to shape audience response. Yet the historical contexts in which these forms developed have meant that we analyse each of these crafts using subtly different principles and language.

Theorists and practitioners of stage magic are habitually pragmatic in their approach to separating matters of artistry and aesthetics from matters of craft, and are not squeamish about describing what they do as manipulation. I argue that this may be due to the ways in which conjuring has been interpreted historically, with links between stage magic and the dark arts being brought to the fore. By contrast, alternative comedy grew in response to a political context in which notions of popular rebellion and the supposed democracy of the form were particularly prized. Comedians can consequently be reluctant to recognise their techniques as coercive or manipulative.

This paper argues that the ways in which we have historically described our

164 interaction with comedians and conjurers has subtly influenced the way we understand these similar crafts. I will attempt to demonstrate that ‘manipulation’ may be a useful framework through which to understand all forms of comic performance.

Dr Sophie Quirk is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, where she primarily teaches popular and comic performance. She is currently working on a monograph exploring the social and political influence of contemporary British stand-up comedy, which is due to be published by Methuen in September 2015.

165 Scenography Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Hannah Gravestock A performance-led investigation into using costume as a creative partner

In this performance I examine the ice skate as a semi-autonomous item of costume that, through an evolving partnership with the skater, contributes to the artistry of a dance. The ice skate covers, protects and decorates the foot. It is a multi-disciplinary object, described using vocabulary from sport, dance, fashion and costume. However, due to the skate’s inherent instability when worn, its weight, and its often painful grip on the foot, the skate can never fully integrate with the body. Gradually, carefully and sometimes brutally laced to the feet, these costumes are put on, yet become, almost immediately, disembodied. As separate entities they imprint, or perhaps more accurately, impose their physical presence and history onto the feet. To learn to work with these separate and additional presences/histories a skater uses a series of training exercises, which eventually form the basis of competitively performed dances on the ice. However, whilst the skate’s role in facilitating required technical elements is understood, the ice skate’s contribution to the art of the dance is largely undocumented. This performance is part of an investigation into better understanding the ice skate’s individual creative and choreographic potential. Created on a 2m x 2m surface of synthetic ice, it brings skater and skate back together in an unfamiliar environment. Video footage of the development of this performance both documents the process and provides additional data to assess the transition between learning to dance through a costume to dancing with a costume.

Dr Hannah Gravestock is a scenographer, designer, ice dancer and researcher. In addition to training at the Laboratoire d’Etude du Mouvement. Hannah has trained in Parkour, aerial performance, and continues to perform in sport and dance. Her current research centres on drawing as research, performing scenography, and drawing and mental health.

166 Nicholas Arnold The Ghost is (already) in the Machine – the costume as its own history

Tutankhamun’s funerary mask tells us more about him than his shrivelled body; Brecht’s street hawker can dress himself in imaginary clothes. Costumes can manifest character while still unworn; costume can be created purely in the imagination: in rehearsal you imaginatively ‘clothe’ yourself. We think of clothing in terms of individual items, which we select and reject to complete our external picture. But a costume on its hanger is coherent in not only outline but identity – a complete “other”. It dares you to make it your own; to take it over. Costumes wait to be inhabited, yet they seem already lived in.

When a “real” costume – made, re-made, hired or found – is finally first put on, there is a profound shock. Not only the shock of the reality of unexpected colour, weight and texture; the fall of the garment and the feel of the cloth; unfamiliar roughness and unexpectedly sensuous touches – and smells. But there is a psychic shock. It is like putting-on someone else’s shoes – difficult and disturbing, and with a strong sense of trespass. The costume sits and moves on the body as if for other “ghost” bodies – the past or future wearers. It has already slid into contours which tell us about a past – real or imaginary. There is an encounter with an almost tangible personality. Re-moulding it for the current performance becomes a necessary process: it must be turned towards the future. But it can be questionable, looking in the mirror, who is looking back.

Nicholas Arnold was educated at Oxford, where he read History and Social Anthropology. He worked professionally as a performer, director, and deviser before entering academia. He has taught at Oxford, Aston, Birmingham, and De Montfort universities, and led Theatre in the team which developed the innovative degree course in Performing Arts at Leicester Polytechnic. He is National Professor Emeritus in Cultural Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, guest professor at the Universities of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and Malta, and Tutor for the multi-national European Masters in the Science of Performer Creativity.

Sarah Winter Tracing the Performed Ghost: creating an environment that encourages memory recall and emotional engagement in participants

This paper investigates the role of the physical space as a means for accessing internal reflections and contributes new terminology, the Performed Ghost and the Monadic Environment, to the discourse surrounding audient-centric

167 artworks that place the participant at the centre of the work. The term, Performed Ghost was created to describe the memories and emotional engagement that the participant experienced in the practice-led research during Sarah Winter’s doctoral studies. The analysis of participant reflections from three creative practice cycles are utilised to discuss the role of the physical space in terms of design, construction and the participant experience. The paper draws upon Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space(1964), Ilya Kabakov’s Total Installations and Leibniz’s theory of Monadology (1714) to provide a conceptual framework which enables an investigation into the elements and techniques that can be utilised to construct an immersive environment. Of interest is the key question - how can the space be manipulated and constructed to evoke memory recall and what then is the effect of these memories? The role of ambiguity in spatial design and the construct of the Monadic Environment will be discussed as possible techniques for using the physical scape as a means for accessing the internal geography of the participant and as a result, evoking memory recall and summoning the Performed Ghost.

Sarah Winter is a performance maker, installation artist, academic and designer. Her research and practice focus on memory and the audience experience in immersive environments. She is currently completing her PhD at Queensland University of Technology after achieving first class Honours investigating audience driven dramaturgy in visual theatre making. Her work as a solo artist includes site designer at Metro Arts for Brisbane Festival (2013) and Food artist on The Last Supper (Reckless Sleepers/WTF2013). In 2011, she received a number of awards for boy girl wall (The Escapists/Metro Arts/La Boite/Critical Stages Tour).

Bridget Keehan Evocations of Past, Present and Future in Day to Go, a site-specific show

Through its scenographic design, the performance ofDay to Go, presents the town of Barry through a multi-layered staging, evoking a mingling of past, present and future in momentary co-existence through scenic arrangement and choreography. I employ ‘palimpsest’ as a means for articulating both the method of creating material and the ways in which the performance resonates.

The idea of ‘palimpsest’ is used to describe the ‘writing over’ and ‘erasure’ that is happening when a site (which has an identifiable current use) is re-inscribed through performance that reveals past usage of the site. To illustrate this I describe how, in the performance of Day to Go, sites such as the former Lido (now communally acknowledged and used as a dog walking area) form the basis for the creation of a synchronised swimming display and, for the creation

168 of a character, who, in her act of ‘diving’ into the space creates a ‘writing over’ the current identity of the site and, at the same time, brings back to the surface a past inscription. The seepage between layers of time inDay to Go is made manifest through choreographed sequences that point to ‘past existences’. This is a conscious strategy as the show invites audiences to make connections between the shifting identities of the sites the performance takes them to and their own changing, emerging, dying, multi-layered selves.

Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Harriet Richmond The Motley Theatre Design Course: Documenting theatre design pedagogy

The paper will address the theme of ‘scenographic histories’ by posing the question: How have theatre design pedagogies shaped approaches to scenographic practice?

The Motley Theatre Design Course, established in 1966 at Sadler’s Wells Theatre by Margaret ‘Percy’ Harris emerged from practices at the London Theatre Studio (LTS) (1936 − 1939) and the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1946- 1951) (Saint-Denis, 1960, pp 44-45). Analysis of primary source material of interviews with Harris (British Library, 1992) provided the basis for an initial exploration of the pedagogic philosophy of the Motley course (Richmond, 2012). In this analysis, five key principles were identified and it was suggested that these emerged from a particular theatre-making environment and period, which emphasised a mutually dependent and interrelated approach to theatre production. However, in the interviews with Harris, reference to the teaching practices adopted on the course is limited and the learner’s account is absent.

To address this gap, a focus group of Motley alumni was held in March 2014. The paper will highlight the use of an adapted narrative research technique in the focus group (Bell & Bell, 2012) that is concerned with the relationship of objects to biography and identity. Focus group participants were invited to bring objects to the focus group that they associated with the Motley course. The paper will identify why this method was selected (and adapted) and the perceived impact of the method on the type and nature of participant narratives.

Harriet Richmond is in the third year of a six year part-time PhD at the University

169 of Birmingham, entitled ‘Stage designer: Illustrator, collaborator or auteur? Pedagogy, professional identity and the role of the visual in theatre performance’.

Sophie Jump The Invisible Designer: Jocelyn Herbert’s designs for The Kitchen (1958 &1961)

The whole history of the past (what has been called history-as-actuality) can be known to the historian only through the surviving record of it (history- as-record), and most of history-as-record is only the surviving part of the remembered part of the observed part of the whole. (Gottschalk, 1950, p.45)

With Gottschalk’s observation in mind this paper will consider the challenges facing researchers in assessing Herbert’s design process and her role in the staging of Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen (1959 &1961). It will also question the traceability of the designer’s input into a collaborative model such as for this production that also has an unusual lack of design documentation. The Jocelyn Herbert Archive has an extensive collection of Herbert’s designs but there are no notes or artefacts relating to The Kitchen and I have not been able to trace any in other archives or private collections. Additionally, although Herbert came to be relied upon as a key collaborator by the directors with whom she worked, the theatrical environment in which she practiced partly valued her for her ability to ‘serve the play and keep out of its way’ (Hampton, 2012) suggesting that the ideal designer should be invisible.

The areas considered in this paper will contribute to the ongoing debate about the role and status of the theatre designer in the creation of theatrical productions.

Sophie Jump is currently researching a PhD on Motley and Jocelyn Herbert at UAL, having curated the exhibition When Marcel Met Motley at the V&A (2008). She is also a theatre designer and is Associate Director of performance company Seven Sisters Group, who are well known for their site-specific work. Former Joint Honorary Secretary of the Society of British Theatre Designers, she is co-editor of the SBTD journal, and co-editor of their latest catalogue. Her design work has been selected to represent Britain at every Prague Quadrennial since 1999 and she was awarded the World Stage Design Gold medal in 2013.

170 Francesca Peschiar Preserving the Process: Scenography and Visual Identity in Regional Theatre

In 2006 the ‘Glory of the Garden’ conference addressed the lack of attention given to regional theatre since the original 1984 Arts Council report. The Liverpool Everyman was heralded as a key example of regional theatre’s initiative and tenacity, where: ‘The sheer vibrancy of design and performance have lead to strong loyalty from Merseyside audiences ’ (Dorney & Merkin, 2010, p. 57).

However having been raised as significant, the scenographic aspect of this, as with other regional theatres, has been largely left unexamined. Using the Liverpool Everyman (merged in 2000 with the ‘traditional’ repertory Liverpool Playhouse to become the Merseyside Theatres Trust) this paper will make a case for a re-addressing of the value given to the scenographic impact of contemporary regional theatre and its role within the visual realization of regional artistic policy.

In light of Armstrong’s (2010) study of emergent British Identity through scenography at the National Theatre, I argue that realizing the visual in ‘Made in Liverpool’ productions (new writing or interpretations by Liverpudlian writers) concerns the ‘glocal’ identity of the theatre. Namely that regional theatres have a localist agenda but aim to be national and international in their cultural scope (Aydon & Bodinetz, 2005) especially in the light of the city’s successful bid as European Capital of Culture in 2008. Navigating and visualising this complex identity is not always clear from the final production photographs or reception, thus the preservation of process documents such as stage managers reports, prompt copies and production meeting minutes are integral.

Francesca Peschiar is a first year PhD candidate at Chelsea College of Arts. Her research concerns contemporary theatre design processes at the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and the relationship between theatre design practice and artistic policy. During her MRes: Arts Practice, also at Chelsea, she examined collaboration in theatre design and the legacy of Jocelyn Herbert. She also holds a BA in Theatre and Performance design from Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and is the founding editor of Intellect journal JAWS: The Journal of Arts Writing by Students, written and peer reviewed entirely by students.

171 Andy Smith Chekhov Home Movies

The scenography of a Chekhov play calls for what Aronson has described as an ‘emotional sensibility’ (‘The Sceonography of Chekhov’,The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, 2000, p. 134), yet the orthodox traditional staging of Chekhov’s plays are defined through a plethora of objects and signifiers that befits the adjective “Chekhovian”. This presentation will examine the use of Chekhovian signifiers through a 2013 multimedia production of The Cherry Orchard, exploring the play through a performance environment made up of an audio-visual installation projecting video sequences and soundscape. The recorded media creates a ‘ghosting effect’ by framing the action in projected video as ‘home movies’ made by the family before the death of young Grisha (a death which haunts the subsequent action of the play), presented not only through the media but also the way time and space are framed in the overall sceneography of the production. The choice of translation, costume and scenic space all combined to create multiple diagetic worlds moving between video and live performance. This paper will present the video extracts from the multimedia and in doing so will explore Janet Malcom’s assertion that “it is hard to think of a Chekhov play or story in which no death occurs (or over which, having already occurred, it doesn’t hover as the drowning of Ranevskaya’s son hovers over The Cherry Orchard.) Death is the hinge on which the work swings.” ( J. Malcolm, Reading Chekhov, 2001, p. 203).

Dr Andy W. Smith is the Associate Head of the School of Media in the Faculty of Creative Industries at the University of South Wales. He has published on the theatre of Howard Barker, horror cinema and the Gothic in popular culture. He is currently co-editing a book on Howard Barker and The Wrestling School for Methuen Drama.

Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

Rebecca Pollock and Rachel Nicholson

A PechaKucha showcasing Pollock and Nicholson’s current research into feminist installation and performance. RAPTURE is a work-in-progress performance piece that aims to explore what Pollock is identifying as Trans- Romantic Feminist Iconography; turning towards the Romantic Sublime in order to develop a decidedly feminine aesthetic and dramatic form but that

172 which couples itself with a sense of contemporary feminist dialectics. Using Isadora, a projection software originally designed for dance choreography, Pollock and Nicholson have created a performance piece where action, language, projection, lighting and sound respond in the moment to each other and the space, creating a series of unique performances that provide for their audiences a continuum of scenography and memory as both the performers and technology begin to map and respond to each other’s presence and actions. The cyclical and impulse-driven nature of the work underpinned by implicit new technology in this context offers a feminist scenography that at once draws on and exposes the sublime power the feminine. In doing so, temporal feminisms are evident, but not those which necessarily progress linearly but instead move backward in order to pass through the present and into a future of feminist performance. Seen thus, the scenographic occupies a time of suspension and memory where semioticity and materiality are activated at the very moment of the differential temporal orchestration, which the eventual work enables.

Rebecca Pollock teaches primarily on the American Theatre Arts Degree at Rose Bruford but also on the Acting Part-Time Course and the Distance Learning Degree. She is also an Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University on the Drama Studies Degree where she runs a diverse selection of modules that range from Devising Performance through Theatre History and into Feminist and Queer Performance. Along with her specialism in American Drama, it is “the other” of feminist theory and performance that her own practice explores. Rebecca is also a founding member of Shady Dolls Theatre Company.

Rachel Nicholson is the Programme Director of the Creative Lighting Control Degree Course at Rose Bruford College. Having previously worked as a technician and designer for a number of venues and companies including, The National Theatre and Clean Break Theatre Company, Rachel’s interests and research focuses on scenography and technology in live performance.

Nick Hunt What’s the Small Idea? A miniature art gallery for one

Theatre has sometimes revealed and even deliberately sought to draw attention to its materiality and its nature as a constructed artifice. Other theatre traditions, however, have aimed for a different kind of experience for the viewer, one in which the material circumstances of performance are suppressed in order to create a concentrated, individualised engagement with the thematic content of the work. The adoption of the proscenium stage has been a principle strategy in this kind of theatre making, originating in the Italian Renaissance theatre and 173 prompted by the invention of perspectival drawing and so the notion of the picture frame as a ‘window’ onto a fictional world.

‘What’s the Small Idea?’ is a miniature art gallery for one person, designed to invite speculation on a series of questions. Entering the small box seated on a wheeled stool to view photographic images, one might ask: am I a spectator or a performer? Is this a private experience, or a public one? Is this an art gallery or a stage? Is this an immersive experience or one that prompts self-awareness? What is the materiality of a digital image, and that of its subject? In what sense are the images ‘present’? In particular, and connecting to the theme of the conference call, ‘What’s the Small Idea?’ asks us to think about presence – our own and the artwork’s. To what extent do the artworks shown have a permanent existence, and to what extent are they dependent on the performative moment?

15-minute lecture followed by 60-minute practical demonstration and discussion, which may run over into the following break. The gallery will be available to view throughout the conference.

Nick Hunt graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering before deciding that theatre was more interesting than thermodynamics. After ten years as a professional lighting technician and designer, he started teaching at Rose Bruford College, where – some seventeen years later – he is currently Head of the School of Design, Management and Technical Arts. His doctoral thesis, “Repositioning the Role of Lighting in Live Theatre Performance”, examined the performative potential of light. Nick’s other research interests include digital scenography and digital performance, the history of theatre lighting, and the roles and status of the various personnel involved in theatre- making.

Working Groups Session 4 Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Greer Crawley The sectional elevation as a scenographic structure

My paper will consider the sectional elevation as a scenographic structure; a spatial visualisation that is both diagrammatic and mnemonic. Within the tectonic grid, characters and events are organised into a multilayered narrative with dramatic subplots and time frames. This visual storyboard is cinematic and graphic, the optical reading of it panoramic. Scanning the transparent 174 architectural layers, the spectator perceives different spatial and temporal events simultaneously. Interior becomes exterior, then becomes now. Using the examples of Es Devlin’s design for Chimerica and Mariele Neudecker’s exhibition Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes, I will illustrate how the section is used to structure temporal and spatial connections and relationships, reflecting the multiplicity of viewpoints and the variance of perception in contemporary presentations.

Greer Crawley is a senior lecturer in Spatial design at Buckinghamshire University and visiting lecturer in Scenography at Royal Holloway, University of London and MA Contextual studies, Costume in Performance, London College of Fashion. A practising designer, editor, curator and researcher, she has an MAS (Masters of advanced Studies in Scenography) from the Institute of Design and Technology, The University of the Arts, Zurich and a Dr.Phil from the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna. Editor for the quarterly journal of The Society of British Theatre Designers, Reviews editor Theatre and Performance Design, UK commissioner for OISTAT Publications commission and curator for Antarctica Prague Quadrennial 2015. Publications include: ‘Mariele Neudecker’ P.E.A.R. (Paper for Emerging Architectural Research), 2014 ‘Soundings’. In: Mariele Neudecker Hinterlands, Trondheim Kunstmuseum,Trondheim, Norway, 2014 ‘Seduction Chaff in The Air is One Vast Library by Mariele Neudecker’:in Space and Desire Monitoring Scenography 3, Zurich University of the Arts, 2011.

Aoife Monks Craft: A Manifesto

Where is costume positioned in the hierarchies of the theatre? Often framed as frippery, a merely decorative aspect of the stage picture, the work of costume is frequently diminished in the scholarly attention to, and critical reception of, the theatre event. By implication, the ‘craft’ work of theatre - the labour of designing and making costumes is imagined to be sublimated to the work of writers, directors and actors, often within an imagined kind of servitude to the illusion. This paper thinks about the work that costume does, and the workers that make the costume, by considering the categories of virtuosity, technique and craft at the theatre, moving the analysis of costume from its appearance onstage into the rehearsal room, the wings, the workshop and the wardrobe.

Aoife Monks is a Reader in Theatre Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of The Actor in Costume (Palgrave, 2010) and the forthcoming Readings in Costume with the designer Ali Mclaurin (Palgrave Macmillan). She is co-editor of Contemporary Theatre Review Journal and is currently working on a monograph on virtuosity and stage Irishness. 175 Theatre History and Historiography Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Philip Watkinson Spacing the Past, Affecting the Future: Site-Specific Performance and Affective Materialism

This paper addresses the ways in which arts centres have utilised site-specific performance to explore the histories of their sites, and how through doing so they have complicated the practical and theoretical intersections between space and affect. Drawing on a combination of non-representational theory (Thrift 2008; Anderson and Harrison 2010) and materialist geography (Lefebvre 1991; Harvey 1996), the first part of the paper examines Geraldine Pilgrim’s promenade performance TOYNBEE, which took place in Toynbee Hall and Studios. It is shown how this performance simultaneously embedded itself within and constructed a complex stratigraphy, where events from the building’s history were placed in dialectical relation with events occurring in the present.

The second part expands this analysis from a single performance to an entire season. In the autumn of 2013 the Battersea Arts Centre celebrated its 120th anniversary with a season of specially commissioned performance works that celebrated the political and cultural heritage of the building. Through the analysis of Il Pixel Rosso’s immersive guided tour Rebels and Rubble and Seth Kriebel’s performance game The Unbuilt Room, the spatio-affective tensions between the BAC’s multilayered histories and its ongoing mission to ‘invent the future of theatre’ are interrogated.

This paper is located within a wider research project that resituates Anderson’s notion of ‘affective materialism’ in the context of performance analysis. Hailing from geography, this notion seeks to develop a ‘materialism that thinks through how a quasi-idealist/quasi-corporeal dimension of affect is internal, rather than in supplement or opposition, to materiality.’ (2004: 741) It is argued that through this resituation the interrelations between contemporary spatial theory and the ‘affective turn’ may be examined; not only where they interact constructively but where they contradict each other and what may be learnt from this.

176 Philip Watkinson is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University of London. He completed his MA in European Theatre at the University of Kent, where he studied under Prof. Hans Thies-Lehmann and Prof. Patrice Pavis, and holds a first-class BA in Performing Arts from the University of Winchester. His doctoral research examines the interrelations between space and affect in postdramatic performance contexts, and seeks to develop an affective-materialist approach to performance research. His other research interests include the radicality of the contemporary theatrical avant-garde and the shifting role of the dramaturg in the 21st Century. His critical writing has appeared in Total Theatre Magazine and Birmingham Journal of Literature and Language.

Matthew Reason Walking and Biography: The Resurrection of Joyce Reason

Life writing is a form of resurrection: seeking to bring a life back to life through various forms of remembering and inevitably acts of forgetting. The Resurrection of Joyce Reason is an ongoing practice-based engagement with the act of biographical reconstruction, which utilizes archives, objects, photographs, family memories, literary traces and what Margaret Atwood describes as ‘plausible whoppers’ to explore the process and potential of writing a life.

This paper focuses on the role of walking, place and the body in the performance of biographical research. In particular it reflects upon a collection of walks relating to the attempted resurrection of my Great Aunt Joyce.

The nature and veracity of these walks is varied. They include walks that Joyce undertook; walks that I have taken to places where I knew she had lived or visited; walks that I imagined she might have undertaken but perhaps didn’t. They include solitary hikes, collective missions and political marches.

Drawing on the ideas of writers such as Susan Griffin (‘perhaps we are like stones’), Lucy Lippard (‘the juxtaposition of two unlike realities combined to form an unexpected new reality’), David Abrams (‘the body’s silent conversation with things’) and Rebecca Solnit (‘It starts with a step and then another step and then another step’) this paper operate through the performance of the archive. That is through accumulation, through overlay, through time travel, through storytelling, through the absent body, through the walking body.

Matthew Reason is Professor of Theatre and Performance at York St John University, UK. His research engages with theatre and dance audiences, theatre for children, performance documentation and photography. Publications include Documentation, 177 Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance (Palgrave 2006), The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre(Trentham/IOE Press 2010) and, co-edited with Dee Reynolds, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Contexts (Intellect 2012).

Romany Reagan Grief Symbolisation, Multiple Becomings and Anachronistic Space: the Cemetery as a Unique Ground for a Walking Practice

In this paper I will explore three key theoretical considerations regarding space and place in regards to a walking practice within a cemetery: symbolisation and placing of grief, as explored by Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey in their study on the ways in which Western mourners relate to their dead, and the collected work of Doris Francis, Leonie Kellaher and Georgina Neophytou, in their expansive inquiry into the cemetery as a space of mourning practice. I will then introduce Doreen Massey’s concept of ‘contemporaneous multiple becomings’, as it relates to historical sites, and expand upon this to interrogate and unpick possible new meanings for Anne McClintock’s concepts of anachronistic space.

The relationships between each of these theories will be analysed with a view towards offering a greater understanding of the complexity of a cemetery space. I aim to illustrate that this complexity lends itself well to crafting an audio walking practice. Cemeteries offer a unique chance to explore the possibilities of ‘contemporaneous multiple becomings’: they are at once historical places, with rich opportunities for an imaginative opening up of space, and contemporary green spaces. Cemeteries are also excellent examples of ‘anachronistic space’, that is to say modern life continuing in a cemetery that is preserved in an anterior time and dedicated to the memory of people long past. The kaleidoscopic potentials of place within a cemetery provide fertile ground for a walking practice, and a richness of possibility.

With the disembodied audio format, the listening walker experiences a fragmentation of temporal awareness. Listening to a voice already from the past (whether that be a remove of weeks, or years) brings to the fore thoughts of the cemetery at once moving forward and backward through time. Audio stories of happenings long past, overlaying sights of modern joggers and anachronistic gravestones, offers a way to experience an artistic culmination of the cemetery as a multiple becoming.

Romany Reagan is a second year PhD candidate in the department of drama at Royal

178 Holloway, University of London. Her practice explores theories of anachronistic space, grief symbolisation and cite-based performance through the medium of audio walks in Abney Park Cemetery. Areas of research encompass theatre archaeology, heterotopias, liminal spaces, human geography, the uncanny and the Victorian ‘cult of the dead’.

Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Sam Haddow “Ladies and Gentlemen, you don’t belong here”: Blood + Chocolate’s dramatic rebuttal to our new ‘patriotic’ WW1

In the year of its centenary, institutional perspectives on WW1 are being radically revised, with David Cameron calling for celebratory street parties and Michael Gove lamenting a ‘just war’ fought for a ‘noble cause’ being hijacked by ‘left wing myths’ that undermine its patriotic significance (Daily Mail, 2 January 2014). These views are being reflected in drastic alterations to the national curriculum, and a history syllabus offering a triumphant narrative of ‘our island story’ as historical fact. History is again a battleground, and the stakes – the education of future generations, the legacy of past events and the integrity of historiographic praxis – are prohibitively high.

This paper argues that the theatrical productionBlood + Chocolate (York, 2013) offered a rebuttal to these revisions, and highlighted theatre’s unique ability to contribute to the ongoing historiography debates. A collaboration between regional theatre companies and hundreds of local volunteers, this promenade piece tracked the fate of men who fought in WW1, and the women who took their places in the local confectionary industry. The project sought to spatially connect two time periods a century apart, highlighting both the dependence of the present on the events of the past and – crucially – the unknowability and inaccessibility of that past to the present. This latter concern was telegraphed in Blood + Chocolate during representations of combat, where spectators were ushered along with the words ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you don’t belong here’. This sentiment advances a timely and uniquely theatrical notion of historiography, one that emphasizes history as a ‘present tense activity’ (Jenkins, 1991) whilst maintaining an ethics of investigation that eschews absolutist narratives, like those of Cameron and Gove, that overwrite the past to serve the interests of the present.

179 Sam Haddow is a lecturer in Drama, Applied Theatre and Education at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, with research interests and forthcoming publications in political and protest theatre, apocalypse and end narratives, stand-up comedy and historiographic theory.

Pauline Hadaway Common Voices – building the future from the past?

‘The Filleting Machine is about pain and anger. For me, the father is a giant of a man. A fighter. A hard man. He and his wife are heroic because however much they struggle, they must finally submit to their destiny. Big men, like all big things, are vulnerable to change. But I admired these people. They had a strength, humanity and a wilful purpose’. Tom Hadaway, interviewed by the author in 2003.

For the modern imagination, to realize the future seems inextricably linked to trauma, conflict and the violent erasure of the past. To live contentedly in the modern world is to submit unknowingly to ones destiny; to think, feel and act in communion with the past ‘without conscious concentration’ (Bourdieu 1984: 170). To live freely, ‘to be authentically oneself ’ demands struggle, however impossible, against the inherited structures of domination and submission that ‘twist and constrict our being’ (Berman, M 1970: xiv).

Marking the debut of two significant, regional, working class voices, Tom Hadaway’s The Filleting Machine (1974) and Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge (1960), simultaneously repudiate and yearn to rediscover a common ground of language, culture, shared history and connection to place. Whether on the North Shields Fish Quay or in the shipyards of Belfast, the plays dramatize the way economic and socially modernizing forces intrude upon ‘ordinary lives’.

Providing the raw material through which communities and groups attempt to “imagine” themselves, culture and language become the building blocks for constructing and reconstructing a shared sense of identity, in which to achieve group allegiance and solidarity. This paper looks at the deconstruction of memory, identity and historical continuity, through Hadaway and Thompson’s dramatization of community breakdown, spoken through the very language, rituals and symbolism that once bound people to place.

Speaking to an emerging and increasingly visible local audience, finding ‘music in the speech of ordinary people’, challenging traditional conventions of staging and producing theatre, this paper argues that The Filleting Machine and Over

180 the Bridge mark ‘a gear change’ for regional, working class theatre (Hall 2003:xiii), providing sounding boards for the first echoes of a new common, cultural voice.

Pauline Hadaway has worked in arts, theatre and education since 1990 in a number of roles, including senior arts manager and as director of Belfast Exposed Photography between 2000 and 2013. Pauline is undertaking doctoral research at the University of Manchester, examining political interventions in Northern Irish cultural policy and practice in the construction and performance of identity. Publications include: “A Cautionary Tale”, Printed Project, 2008; “Policing the Public Gaze”, Manifesto Club, 2009; “Us and Them: The making and dissemination of the photography of protest: roundtable discussion”, Photoworks, May 2011; “Escaping the Panopticon”, Either...And, Ph Research group, October 2012; “Re-imagining Titanic, re-imaging Belfast” in Relaunching Titanic: Memory and Marketing in the ‘Post Conflict’ City, William J. V. Neill (ed), Routledge 2013.

Anwen Jones and Rowan O’Neill Living Maps of Wales: Place, Space and Performance in the work of Owen Rhoscomyl (Arthur Owen Vaughan) and Cliff McLucas

This paper offers a comparative, critical reading of the work of two creative practitioners; Pageant master and script writer, Owen Rhoscomyl, and theatre producer and scenographer; Cliff McLucas. In 1909, Owen Rhoscomyl wrote and staged Wales’s only national pageant to date; ‘The National Pageant of Wales’. This flamboyant, theatrical event, staged in Cardiff, proposed and presented, ‘a living map of Wales’. Almost a century later, in 1999, Cliff McLucas formed the idea of the ‘deep map’. This development can be traced back to his earlier involvement with the site-specific, Welsh theatre company, Brith Gof and their development of “theatre/archaeology” or “performance archaeology”’. McLucas went on to develop his deep mapping practice beyond its original context into a process of visualization attempting to represent the totality of a place in its geographical, cultural and spiritual manifestations. A reading of Rhoscomyl’s performative mapping of Wales in the light of McLucas’s deep mapping practice, offers both an example of what theatre and performance history can bring to the debate about space and place and what philosophies of space and place can bring to theatre and performance history. Rhoscomyl and McLucas were engaged in presenting and re-presenting different, often idiosyncratic, experiences of Wales at different stages in its life as a nation. A comparative reading of their work reveals the historical significance of each distinct endeavour to the development of a wider discourse around ideas of place and space in modern and contemporary Wales. 181 Anwen Jones is Head of the Theatre, Film and Television Department at Aberystwyth University. She is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies and Chair of AU’s Branch of the Coleg. She is editor of the Welsh language, inter-disciplinary academic e-journal, Gwerddon. She is the author of National Theatres in Context: France, Germany, England and Wales (Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2007) and co-editor of Wil Sam: Dyn y Theatr (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2009) and Ysgrifau ar Theatr a Pherfformio (UWP, 2013). Her journal publications include studies of twentieth century French theatre and drama, and the historical and contemporary study of Welsh drama, theatre and pageantry.

Rowan O’Neill is an artist and writer from Felinwynt, Ceredigion. Her practice and research represents a continued exploration of language, identity, place and belonging. In 2013 she completed a doctoral study of the archive of the artist and scenographer Cliff McLucas at Aberystwyth University under the sponsorship of the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol. Her thesis is titled, ‘Croesi’r bar: archwilio hunaniaeth y mewnfudwr Prydeinig trwy gyfrwng archif yr artist Cliff McLucas’ (Crossing the bar: exploring the identity of the British incomer through the medium of the Cliff McLucas archive). She is currently a Creative Fellow at Aberystwyth University.

Panel Sessions 1 Thursday 4th September 11.30-1.00pm

Helen E. M. Brooks ‘It was just like that out there’ Wartime Representations of the Trenches

The CFP asked ‘what can theatre and performance history bring to the debate about space and place?’. My paper responds to this question by considering how early twentieth-century theatrical engagements with the spaces of the ‘Great War’ (in particular the trenches and battlefields of France and Belgium) served as crucial mediators of a particular, spatially-located, experience. Perhaps more than any other war, the First World War is, and was, defined in the popular imagination by a unique type of space: the trenches. Today we remain fascinated by the embodied experience of the trenches with re-enactment societies planning to mark the centenary of the war by living in dug-out trenches and the Imperial War Museum offering a ‘trench experience’. However this fascination with these temporary spaces of war in which men lived and died was also evident 100 years ago. In the years of, and immediately following, the war, people ‘at home’ also sought to understand and access the experience undergone by serving

182 men, and to construct a ‘memory’ of the war. War poetry has received extensive attention over the last century as one of the means by which this was achieved. However the theatre’s role has been largely ignored. In this paper I argue that contemporary theatrical representations of the trenches should be considered for the important social role they performed, both for members of the public and for those who had experienced these spaces first-hand. Examining productions such as The Better ‘Ole in which the theatre was ‘made-up’ to look like a trench, and in which soldiers in the audience were reported to have told their families, ‘that’s just what it was like’, I consider how dramatic representations of the trenches provided a framework within which the trauma of war could be articulated between soldiers and their families.

Helen Brooks is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent. She has published widely on eighteenth-century theatre, with a particular focus on actresses and gender. Her book Actresses, Gender, and the 18C Stage: Playing Women is due to be published with Palgrave in November. Helen’s current work is on British theatre during the First World War. She is Co-Investigator of ‘Gateways to the First World War’, an AHRC consortium for public engagement with WW1.

Jo Robinson Putting performance back into place: the Malt Cross Music Hall project

Performance can be viewed as uniquely rooted to place because it happens in shared time and space with its audience, but it can also be said to be placeless in that it is non-object oriented and non- commodity based. Unlike the Mona Lisa or other static art works, there isn’t a place you can go to see ‘Interior Scroll’ by Carolee Schneeman or other famous performance works. They happened. And then they were over. You really had to be there. (Leslie Hill, in Performance and Place: 6)

In 2013, I led a pilot project with Nottingham’s Malt Cross Music Hall and the University’s Horizon Digital Economy Research Centre focused on re- ‘placing’ memories of performance in this heritage site. The Malt Cross is a Grade II listed building in the centre of Nottingham which was restored in the 1990s and now plays host to a diverse programme of events, exhibitions and performances; at the end of the nineteenth century it was a small music hall hosting low-ranking music hall acts and performers: serio-comic vocalists, big boot dancers, jugglers and boxers. Working with different kinds of archives - newspaper advertisements, early film of music hall performances, published reflections on the nightlife of Nottingham, letters and anecdotal stories gathered 183 over time by the Malt Cross team - the project employed a variety of projection and digital technologies in order to ‘ghost’ memories of performance into their historic place.

Through discussion of this project, I will reflect on current understandings of place as ‘meeting place’ in Massey’s terms, or as ‘taskscape’ in Ingold’s, both approaches which emphasise the role of memory, performance and narrative in creating the networks which coalesce into place at any particular moment. How can such understandings help us develop, and critique, different modes of putting performance back into place?

Jo Robinson is Associate Professor in Drama and Performance in the School of English, University of Nottingham, UK. Her broad research interests are in theatre history and historiography; the digital humanities, and nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first century theatre and performance with a particular focus on the relationships between place, space, community and region. From 2006-09 she led the AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project, ‘Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857-67’: ongoing work with both Nottingham’s Malt Cross Music Hall and the Theatre Royal Nottingham is now exploring ways to re-animate that historical archive in place. Jo’s current major project focuses on theatre and community in the East Midlands and Theatre & the Rural will be published by Palgrave as part of their Theatre & series in 2016.

Rachel Hann The Architecture of V. E. Meyerhold

In 1938 the construction of a new theatre conceived by the Russian theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) was abandoned. This paper charts the findings of a research project that examines Meyerhold’s lost architectural experiment through the use of computer-based 3D visualization as a research method. First proposed in 1930, the new ‘Meyerhold Theatre’ was to be a monument to Meyerhold’s theatrical endeavours and a platform for further innovation. The Russian director envisaged that this bespoke theatre would usher in new era of experimentation due to the distinct spatial possibilities afforded by its architectural arrangement. While construction began in the mid 1930s, upon liquidation of the Meyerhold Theatre Company in 1938 the incomplete building was deserted. Following a hurried re-designed and nine months after Meyerhold’s execution, the building opened to the public as the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in 1940.

This paper will outline how the processes of computer-based 3D visualisation

184 have revealed new insights on this seldom-scrutinized unrealized theatre. Conceived in line with the recommendations of The London Charter (2009), the decision making processes inherent within the practice of visualisation have been documented as part of a bespoke website: available at www.utopiantheatres. co.uk. Focused on issues of intellectual transparency and accessibility, the processes of archival research and visualization were undertaken simultaneously. The resulting documentation is therefore organised into three distinct research phases and are representative of three distinct epistemological readings of the available information that remains on the new theatre. This encompasses a range of different sources, including Meyerhold’s writings and images of previous scenographic work, along with the incomplete architectural drawings of Sergi Vakhtangov and Mikhail Barkhin (the architects assigned to the project). In that regard, this paper will draw upon this procedural documentation to propose the possible dramaturgical implications of the theatre’s architectural arrangement and its significance to later theatrical innovations.

Dr. Rachel Hann is a Performance Historian at Edge Hill University. Her principal research interests are aligned with the study of scenography, performance histories, and architecture. To date, Rachel’s publications have focused on the legacies of modernist performance practices within contemporary architecture and installation art. In 2013 she co-founded the scholarly and professional research network Critical Costume, which led to a co-editorship of a double issue of the peer-reviewed journal Scene (Intellect) due in late 2014. Rachel is currently in the process of writing a monograph entitled ‘Beyond Scenography: Cultures of Performance Design’ for Routledge (due 2017). Rachel is also an Executive Committee member for the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), having previously co-convened the Scenography working group (2010-2013).

Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

Shared Panel with Popular Performance Working Group

Kate Newey Behind the Scenes: Tradition and Liminality in Victorian Pantomime

The Victorian pantomime was full of traditions, even if they were made up each year. It was a performance form which annually wove novelty together with repetition, the expected with the surprising. The paradox of traditional novelties

185 (or new traditions) was framed by nostalgia, most famously in Charles Dickens’ Preface to The Memoirs of Grimaldi, in what Andrew McConnell Stott sees as the genesis of the trope of the sad clown in Dickens’ narrative of the private melancholy of the publicly hilarious Joseph Grimadi.

Every year, in advance of the pantomime, Victorian newspapers and magazines featured articles taking readers backstage, purportedly letting them into secret spaces of the backstage world. The liminal spaces of the wings and the backstage, the gloomy dusty space of the stage in rehearsal mode, were made available to actual and potential audiences. Readers were transformed to spectators, and invited to supplement their memories of childhood enjoyment of going to the pantomime with apparently privileged knowledge of the actual performance practices of pantomime. Such writing aimed at triggering memory and invoking nostalgia for the remembered performances of childhood, at the same time as it promised excitement, novelty and sensation.

This paper will explore the cultural function of tradition through the discussion of two persistent tropes in the documentary traces of Victorian pantomime: nostalgia for performance practices, and the journey backstage. Its historiographical questions are about how we come to know and retrieve, in some form or other, an account of pantomime performance practice within the liminal spaces and places of the London theatre.

Kate Newey is Professor of Theatre History at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on theatre of the long nineteenth century, popular culture, and women’s writing. She is leader of the AHRC-funded Pantomime Project, ‘A Cultural History of English Pantomime, 1837-1901.’

Kate Holmes Placing the Circus: how interwar circus spaces affected reception of female aerialists

In the 1920s and 1930s the highest profile circus performers travelled the globe appearing in a variety of very different venues. In the US these performers appeared in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus (RBBBC) that travelled the US in the summer and erected its canvas tents in empty fields and lots. In the winter they either performed on the vaudeville stage in the US or travelled to Europe to appear in permanent circus buildings such as London’s Olympia or on the variety stage. Not only were the spaces different in terms of their permanence but also in terms of their scale. The RBBBC US three ring, two stage circus was attended by over 10,000 audience members per performance, whereas both the European single ring circus, vaudeville and variety stages represented much smaller, more intimate venues.

186 This paper will consider how audience members would have viewed circus differently in the US and UK contexts with such difference audience sizes and performance spaces. Although academics such as Janet M Davis have written on the US circus from the Victorian era to the early twentieth century, little has been written on the UK context in the 1920s and 1930s. The female aerialist – a performer who performed on equipment such as trapeze or rope – will form the focus of discussion due to her popularity and high profile. It will explore how temporary and permanent performance spaces functioned differently. How did the split focus of the three ring, two stage US circus differ from the central focus of the European single-ring circus and variety or vaudeville stages?

Kate Holmes is a first year AHRC funded doctoral student at the University of Exeter. Her research considers female aerial performers of the 1920s and early 1930s as celebrities and draws upon her experience as an amateur aerialist. For further information see http://eprofile.exeter.ac.uk/kateholmes.

Working Groups Session 4 & Business Meeting Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Dan Rebellato Whatever happened to Gay Naturalism

There are many good reasons for late nineteenth-century Naturalist theatre to have addressed the topic of homosexuality. It was a topical social ‘problem’, denounced as such all through the Naturalist period by Urville (1874), Carlier (1887), Coffignon (1890) and others; it had already started to be represented elsewhere in European literature, in novels by Balzac, Gautier, Sand and others and in the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and more; and Naturalism - fearless in addressing prostitution, alcoholism, incest, veneral disease, adultery, and divorce - prided itself to addressing major social taboos. But Naturalist theatre of the period barely touched on the subject of homosexuality.

Indeed Naturalism as a whole shows a remarkable aversion to inversion; while several Naturalist novels - including works by Zola, Alexis, Adam, Belot, represented versions of what we would now call lesbianism, discussions of male homosexuality was avoided, and sometimes deliberately so. And when Naturalist novels and short stories that represented le saphisme were adapted for the stage, the lesbians disappear or are otherwise transformed out of ready legibility. While the particular constraints of stage censorship is part of the explanation, it’s not the whole explanation. 187 With reference to performances like Nana (1881), Kamraterna (1886), La Fin de Lucie Pellegrin (1888), Ailleurs (1891), this paper will consider the nature of historical absence and will offer an interpretation of this aporetic moment, placing this theatrical non-event in a context of late-nineteenth-century anxieties about degeneracy, the birth rate, German nationalism, and theatrical fiction.

Dan Reballato is Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London. His books include the Decades of British Playwriting: 2000 (2013), The Suspect Culture Book (2013), Contemporary European Theatre Directors (2010), Theatre & Globalisation (2009), and 1956 and All That (1999). His plays for stage and radio have been widely performed.

Veronica Isaac ‘My own house, bought with my own money’

Developed from ongoing PhD research investigating the actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928) this paper discusses the manner in which Terry employed her ‘homes’ as a space within which to ‘fashion’ her professional and private identity. It focuses on the way in which Terry’s domestic environment provided a ‘stage’ for her ‘off-stage persona’.

The daughter of travelling players Terry lived a nomadic existence, until her marriage to the painter G.F.Watts propelled her into a “world full of pictures and music and gentle, artistic people”. Her subsequent elopement with architect and designer Edward Godwin necessitated a six year retreat from society, but also established Terry as a leading figure within the newly emerging Aesthetic Movement. Both relationships had a significant influence on her taste and dress, but, as this paper will discuss, Terry went on to develop her own, distinct, and distinctive, style.

By 1874 financial pressures compelled Terry to return to London, the stage, and society. Terry’s increasing professional success finally provided the actress with the money to begin fashioning her own domestic environment.

As a figurehead for the ‘Cult of Beauty’ Terry dressed both herself, and her houses in a manner which cemented her position as a leading actress who understood the ‘art of theatre’ and design. She also remained conscious of her professional identity, collecting theatrical ephemera and literature which reinforced her position within the theatrical hierarchy, and demonstrated an awareness of the history of both costume and the stage.

This paper will discuss this process of self-fashioning and presentation. It will centre upon an examination of her final home, Smallhythe Place, and the part

188 this space played in shaping and reaffirming Terry’s legacy to theatre history, not only during Terry’s lifetime, but also after the actress’s death.

Veronica Isaac is a specialist in Dress & Textile History and has worked for the Department of Theatre & Performance at the V&A museum since November 2009. Alongside her work for the V&A and teaching at the University of Brighton she is currently studying part time for a PhD under the supervision of Professor Lou Taylor, University of Brighton, and in partnership with the Department of Theatre & Performance, V&A and the National Trust at Smallhythe Place. Her thesis will develop a methodology for analysing historical theatrical costume, for which the personal and theatrical dress of the actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928) provides the primary case study.

189 Theatre, Performance and Philosophy Working Group

Working Groups Session 1 Wednesday 3rd September 1.30-3.30pm

Goran Petrovic A Quasi-Transcendental Politico-Philosophical Perspective on (Dance) Performances - Implications for Performativity and Temporality

Drawing upon the quasi-transcendental philosophical trajectory of Derrida’s thought and the post-foundational political philosophy of Chantal Mouffe, I will envisage the implications of discourse analysis for the political dimension of dance and rearticulation of dance modalities, such as performativity and temporality, in paradoxical terms. Quasi-transcendence versus immanence, paradox versus dialectics, strategies of engagement versus politics of withdrawal, gesture versus speech and prospective versus projective temporality, are some of the questions to be tackled within this presentation.

Goran Petrović is a PhD researcher at the Ghent University (Belgium), the Research centre S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media). His research combines performance theory with the post-foundational political philosophy. Petrović holds Master Degree in Art History from the University of Belgrade (Serbia). Since 2000, he has been working as a freelance researcher, curator and producer in visual and performing arts and film. Petrović is the programme director for Kran Film Resident, Brussels.

James Corby Realising Performance Philosophy: Problems and Possibilities

From one perspective, “Performance Philosophy” does not announce something that is radically new so much as it recognises a key stage in the maturation of a distinctive discourse around a related set of issues where these issues are no longer simply peripheral to their “native” disciplines, but can now be understood together as forming a distinctive field of their own. But this clarifying, pragmatic taxonomising seems to be quite at odds with the more radical potential that the lack of a conjunctive “and” in “Performance Philosophy” appears to indicate. The paratactical momentum of the term seems directed towards a far more

190 profound artistic, intellectual and disciplinary miscegenation where neither performance nor philosophy would remain distinct and intact and neither would be subordinated to or conditioned by the unchanged disciplinary genealogy and underpinnings of the other. But is, then, performance, as an act of deliberate creative expression, not to some degree pulling in the opposite direction to truth-revealing, knowledge-bearing philosophy? Or does Performance Philosophy relate only to more elastic understandings of philosophy that would position thinking as the creation of new concepts (Deleuze) or as the disclosing and opening up of what shows itself (Heidegger)? To what extent then, if at all, is “philosophy” adding to or qualifying “performance”? Or might Performance Philosophy name a process during which the emphasis is varied from performance to philosophy by degrees or in turn? This paper explores these and similar tensions and possible resolutions that this more radical understanding of Performance Philosophy provokes.

Dr James Corby is a senior lecturer and HoD of the Department of English at the University of Malta. He has published on literature and philosophy, including articles on romanticism, modernism, phenomenology, politics, and contemporary American literature. He co-edited Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2013) and he is co-General Editor of the forthcoming journal CounterText. He is currently preparing several projects for publication: a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research called Critical Distance, and two monographs: Performance and the Literary: Ethics, Risk and Play, and The Art of Failure: Romantic and Post-Romantic Aesthetics.

Kélina Gotman Anaesthesis: Falls, Fatigue, Pain and the Limits of Dance

Contestants in 1930s Depression-era dance marathons in America went for days, occasionally weeks, and even months “dancing” – most frequently with a partner – for cash prizes and fame. They were allotted brief hourly intervals during wish to shave, eat or sleep, usually still standing, and shuffling. The point was to keep going, often to the point of collapse; and even so, dancers were often lifted back up to their feet to keep moving. In this intervention, I examine the semiotics of the collapse and fall in relationship to a long history of dancing “manias” in which dancers’ falling to the ground has served as a sign of exhaustion, trance and, more problematically, body failure, read as neuromotor dysfunction. These ungainly gestures – falling, shuffling – constitute what I describe as a form of

191 anaesthesis designed to relieve pain and stop sensation. Performed at the limit of inactivity – even, in rare cases, death – the exhausted dance marathoner offers an “ugly” dance, “mere” movement shorn of dancing steps offering a recognizable aesthetic form. Yet the apparent failure and formlessness of the dance as the dancer proceeds further and further into this “fatigue contest” also suggests the vital necessity of (in) and anaesthetic dancing as pain relief: a salve for economic depression, restlessness, aimlessness and boredom in the first part of the twentieth century. The excessive expenditure of time required for dance marathoning finally brings it paradoxically into close conversation with dance as luxurious expenditure, exuberant and joyous in the sense posited by Georges Bataille (1933).

Kélina Gotman is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of English at King’s College London, and a Core Convenor of Performance Philosophy. Her book on dance manias in nineteenth-century medical and ethnographic literature (Choreomania, forthcoming) looks at the imagined relationship between collective dance ecstasies, neuromotor disorders and radical revolt. She writes on performance, dance and the history and philosophy of science and is translator of Félix Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus Papers. She has collaborated widely on dance and performance productions in Europe and America, most recently a commission for an experimental opera with the London Sinfonietta.

Emma Cox Grievable Dead: Museums, Repatriation and Disturbing Remains

That biological remains collected from around the world during the colonial era are held in substantial quantities in European and North American museums betrays the rapaciousness of enlightenment taxonomy. The language that a newer, critical museology has devised to frame institutional relationships to human remains circumvents ownership paradigms by prioritising custodianship. Over the same period, indigenous communities in North and South America, the Arctic and the Asia Pacific have sought repatriation of human remains, construed by them as ancestors. The grounds on which claimants request repatriation, that is, on ancestral as opposed to scientific or aesthetic bases, reifies genealogical inalienability as both ontology and indigenous religious cosmology. But cases for repatriation must engage complexly with bioethics legislation and evidentiary work concerning provenance, acquisition and DNA. With reference to how relationships with biological remains are performed in transnational negotiations and repatriation ceremonies, I aim to theorise

192 remains’ coexistence as sites of spectral and material ancestry, as well as itemised history. Judith Butler’s discussion of social ontology’s precedence over biological ontology in the framing of grievable life will be retooled as a means of thinking through the conditions under which human remains become ‘grievable dead’. Ewa Domanska’s conceptualisation of bodies of the disappeared as located in ‘the non-absent past’ provokes my approach to contested remains as things that collapse linear temporality. Ultimately, I argue, while repatriation is part of a vocabulary of restitution and completion, what it signifies more powerfully is the capacity of human remains, across time and culture, to disturb.

Emma Cox is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway. Her work examines human migration and object mobility in contexts of performance, activism and new museology. She also has research interests in postcolonial and cross-cultural productions of Shakespeare and Jonson. She is the author of Theatre & Migration (Palgrave, 2014) and the editor of Staging Asylum: Contemporary Australian Plays about Refugees (Currency, 2013). Her work has been published in books such as Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment (Cambridge, 2013) and The Alchemist: A Critical Reader (Arden, 2013) and in journals including Theatre Research Internationaland Shakespeare Studies.

Working Groups Session 2 Thursday 4th September 9.30-11.00am

Mischa Twitchin What chance failure? (Or: On failure: work in progress.)

If failure is not a matter of chance or of accident (other than in the descriptive case of some particular performance), how might one think of it in its necessity? And if chance is not a matter of failure either, then might there be a dialogue between these two possibilities, not least in discussion of that neglected (or even derided) concern, intention? Is there a lesson in the fact that Amazon’s purchasing algorithms anticipate such a dialogue by suggesting that those who bought Feuvre’s volume on failure also “frequently bought” Iverson’s on chance? (Indeed, is it simply a matter of chance that both books are published in the Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series?) If failure is necessary – that is, necessarily contingent (rather than being opposed to the contingent) – how is this evident or determinable in the documentation of “contemporary” performance

193 practice? Can one intend a success or a failure? Or, conversely, is intention an index of what cannot be appraised within this opposition, in which one term is the normative measure of the other? Might there be an impersonal intention in performance that resists its assimilation by a generic recognition that regards each work as comparable to any other? What is the meaning of an “example” in this case? What is there still to be learnt from failure when it becomes a standard, cited as a point of reference – in academic publishing or conferences, for instance – with a canon of practice and its pantheon of accomplished artist- authors?

Starting in September 2014, Mischa Twitchin will begin a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Drama Dept., Queen Mary, University of London. His book, The Theatre of Death: the Uncanny in Mimesis, is to be published in the Performance Philosophy series by Palgrave (2015); and examples of his own performance making can be found on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user13124826/ videos; and on his website: http://www.shunt.co.uk/mischa_twitchin/index.html.

Nik Wakefield On How Failure Requires Success

Failure has become a crucial aesthetic strategy performance art practices utilize for political critique. This criticality operates on varying degrees of visibility but nonetheless aspires to trigger alternative models of perception, cognition and affect that seek ethical modes of participation.

In this presentation I will consider the opportunity presented to performance in the experience of waiting. Perhaps the unavoidable process of duration sets in motion a condition of attention in which the production of failure is merely a boundary through which a re-invented success of sorts is produced? In plain terms, I want to argue that failure is a strategy that returns representation to performance. It does so because the failure is composed, and a composed failure is a paradox of virtuality that collapses the distinctions between real, virtual and possible.

I will refer to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, the writings of Jan Vervoert, Every House Has a Door’s 9 Beginnings, my own performance Three, and the name change project of Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša.

A classic magic trick is to make the coin disappear, but how good is the trick if the coin doesn’t reappear in an unexpected place?

194 Nik Wakefield conducts artistic research in the realm of performance philosophy. His practice-based PhD is titled Time-specificity of Performance. Recent solo works include Three and 2: untitled, performed in London, Helsinki, California and New York. He participates in international conferences through presenting and organising, and recently founded a gallery of practice as research. He received an MA with Distinction in Practising Theatre and Performance from Aberystwyth University and a BFA Cum Laude from Boston University in Theatre Arts. Nik has worked professionally with Heritage Arts Company, Every House Has a Door, Robert Wilson and Punchdrunk.

Neil MacDonald Failed Sacrifice and Mutual Exposure: Ron Athey and Georges Bataille

The performance artist Ron Athey has consistently engaged with motifs of martyrdom and sacrifice in his works. This, coupled with occasional explicit acknowledgements such as the title of his 1999 piece Solar Anus, has placed his work in concert with the dissident surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille. For Bataille the spectacle of sacrifice revealed, in the instant of cutting in to living flesh, one’s own potential finitude or the chance of non-existence, it is not death itself but this instant or exposure that is of paramount importance in sacrifice. For Jean-Luc Nancy Bataille’s writing on sacrifice provides the point of departure from which he rethinks community in terms of this mutual exposure or presence-in-relation. However, the tendency to attribute a meaning to sacrifice, to put sacrifice to work, is almost always impossible to avoid, constituting a failure on Bataille’s own terms.

Athey’s martyrological performances, in particular his Torture Trilogy, have been read primarily in light of his religious upbringing and his experience of the AIDS epidemic or in-line with a masculinist tradition of masochistic performance, testing and reaffirming the limits of the male body. This paper aims to take Athey’s engagement with Bataille seriously and reflects on theTorture Trilogy as failed sacrifice, one that does not produce death or transcendence or reaffirm a bounded masculine subject. Failure is present in Athey and Bataille as a queer and counterhegemonic refusal of mastery.

Neil Macdonald is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD candidate in the department of Art History and Visual Studies at The University of Manchester. His thesis “Psychic, Social, Somatic: Wounding and Queer Embodiment,” supervised by Prof. David Lomas and Dr. Monica Pearl, investigates the intersection of bodily wounding in performance, film and photography with discourses on sexuality, gender and health. Neil teaches undergraduate students in History of Art.

195 Working Groups Session 3 Thursday 4th September 3.00-4.30pm

James Hamilton Interactive v. participatory

In this brief presentation, I suggest some advantages of using the concept, ‘interactive’, over using the concept, ‘participatory’ even though the latter is more familiar to theater and performance theorists. I use the concept of ‘interactivity’ as it is discussed, defined, and deployed in video art and video game research (modulo some work in narratology). I do not cast doubt on the claim that the latter has been, in many respects, a useful concept; but I hope to show why it is a salutary choice to use the concept of ‘interactivity’ to investigate at least some of those same issues.

Three issues, in particular, are illuminated in this way: the classic epistemic problem of knowing what is true of the fictional world described by a work; the related moral problem concerning the ethics of using interactive/participatory methodologies when we are working with real lives; and a way of taking – as an epistemic rather than a metaphysical thesis – the useful suggestion that participatory theater involves ‘a kind of attention-training’.

James Hamilton (Ph.D., 1974, University of Texas) teaches philosophy at Kansas State University. His research is in philosophical aesthetics, especially the aesthetics of theater. He is the author of The Art of Theater (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) and articles on theater and other performance arts in British Journal of Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and The Journal of Aesthetic Education. He has entries on Brecht, on Theater, and on Drama in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, and the Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, respectively.

Deborah Newton Collapsing Binaries and Shifting Perspectives: Towards an Emerging Ontology of Performance

Recent empirical research by the author confirms the ostensible consensus amongst philosophy of performance scholars, researchers and practitioners that performance is constituted and defined by the relationship between the performer and the audience.

196 Given the centrality of this claim to the dynamics of audience participation, its use necessitates and urgently calls for further exploration, particularly when such a claim has to stand as one among a plethora of published instances where descriptive assertion mostly outstrips meaningful explanation.

In so doing, I lean on the philosophical thinking of Horkheimer (1982), Derrida (1981), Barthes (1977) and Fischer-Lichte (2011), amongst others, purposefully avoiding ideological neutrality, in an attempt to make a number of radical provocations concerning prevalent assumptions about the performer- audience relationship and its critical significance in developing a new ontology of performance.

By opening up phenomenological discussion about this unique poietic relationship in live performance, I challenge dominant, repressive perspectives about audience involvement which, despite the performative turn of the 1960’s, continues to focus on an unsubstantiated salient division between the spectator and the performer.

The argument presented, emerging from my current doctoral research, is that the reality of performance cannot be grasped in binary opposition. This is but one of numerous misleading cultural binaries that it is claimed performance helps to destabilise and eventually collapse. In suggesting that performance brings about a liminal transformation of all participants, by collapsing these binaries and moving them away from the apparent stabilising dichotomies of occidental culture, it entails a radical shift in perspective to researching performance from an ‘either-or’ situation into an ‘as-well-as’ perspective.

Deborah Newton FdA. BA (HONS) is Programme Leader at The Arden School of Theatre in Manchester and currently pursuing a PhD in pursuit of a new aesthetic ontology of contemporary performance. She is an active emerging artist involved in performance-making both in this country and abroad. She most recently performed at Dinonysus festival in Croatia, April 2014. Deborah lives in Manchester and thrives on the bustling nature of the city and her theoretical interests and practical involvement in and with a wide range of performance companies in the North West and the development opportunities they present for both her students and herself.

Maia Mackney Radical rhythms: Identity and temporality in the devising process and performance of Unleashed at Barbican Centre in 2012

In this paper I will address issues of temporality through a case study of a 197 participatory project with a professional performance outcome. Unleashed was performed on the Barbican Theatre stage in November 2012 after an eighteen month devising process bringing together six youth ensembles and a creative team of 40. Through the conceptual frameworks of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, I will address issues of duration in the devising process for Unleashed. I will develop and value a multiplicity of durations within a participant’s engagement with an arts practice and explore how a durational process affects the participant’s sense of a self in constant flux.

It will talk to the debate simmering within the field following the publication of Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells, which raises the idea that some participatory arts practices renounce authorial vision in favor of collaboration and dialogue. A study of the Barbican’s participatory ensembles during the period they worked towards Unleashed provides an environment that avoids prescriptively equating slowness and dialogue with an ethically ‘good’ model of participatory ‘best practice’. This paper avoids placing strong authorial vision and a high quality artistic aesthetics in binary opposition to durational dialogic practice. I aim to develop an understanding of what happens during a participatory project, which moves past a traditional ‘transformative’ encounter in which the role of an artist is to ‘liberate’ a participant in some way, towards a nuanced understanding of the qualitative multiplicities involved in a collaborative exchange between artist and participant over time.

Maia Mackney is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Holder in her second year of PhD research working under the supervision of Royal Holloway, University of London and Barbican and Guildhall Creative Learning Department. Her PhD explores how durational and dialogic approaches to participatory projects might contribute to developing sustainable relationships between Barbican and Guildhall Creative Learning department, freelance artists and local communities. Maia received a first class BA Hons from the University of Exeter before beginning her postgraduate research at Royal Holloway. Maia has worked as an actor, freelance participatory theatre practitioner and researcher for a number of arts organisations in London, including Theatre Royal Haymarket and Barbican Centre.

198 Panel Sessions 2 Friday 5th September 10.00-11.30am

Swen Steinhauser Rehearsing the future to come - contextual openings in Benjamin, Derrida and Every house has a door

A citational, as well as archival aspect informs the work of contemporary performance company Every house has a door. Its process driven practice gathers and responds to an array of historiographical sources often neglected within more dominant historical accounts. In their performances, the practice of an archival safeguarding within spatio-temporal compositions mingles with an attitude of the rehearsal: a movement of repetition that maintains a simultaneous reference to the past and to the future. Here, iterations of historiographical marks reckon with their future iterability in other contexts to come. Actively avoiding an arrest under authorial authorities or narrative synthesis, these assemblages leave their marks singularly exposed before the coming of other audiences.

The 2013 production Testimonium cites otherwise the already citational practice of Charles Reznikoff ’s Testimony, a collection of ‘objectivist’ poetry based on the law reports of US court cases (1885-1915). In both Testimony and Testimonium, a citational practice severs the witness and victim accounts of the law reports from their contextual resolutions. By further suspending a rush to judgment, commentary and emotion, the composition avoids the subsumption of its parts under a generality, as well as their processing for ready-made consumption. The exposed injustices merely gesture towards the possibility of a justice that remains always to come. Here, a Derridian as well as a Benjaminian theme of a certain messianism (without messia) unfolds, linking a necessary structural dis- adjustment to the possibility of justice, not as calculable and distributive, but as promised beyond what it actually is.

Swen Steinhäuser is currently writing a PHD in Cultural Studies in the department of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He completed a BA in Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts in 2002 and has worked extensively as a theatre director, performer, lecturer, dramaturg, writer and curator since. Recently, he has published the article ‘Clumsy Creatures: Walter Benjamin in the bestiary of Edwina Ashton’ for Performance Research 18(4) ‘On Falling’. Swen is an editor of parallax, a journal for cultural studies, critical theory and philosophy published by Taylor & Francis. Email: [email protected]

199 Amanda Stuart Fisher The Scene of Witnessing: The ‘Haunting’ of David Oluwale

In this paper I consider a theatre text which represents a ‘real’ life (and ‘real’ death). Exploring questions about the re-presentation of the absent, the forgotten and the unknown, I examine the dramaturgy of The Hounding of David Oluwale (2009), a play by Oladipo Agboluaje which tells the ‘true’ story of David Oluwale’s murder in Leeds in 1969; his absence from public memory and the brutally racist treatment he received from two Leeds police officers who were eventually tried for his manslaughter. In this play – based on meticulous research into the case by Kester Aspden (2008) - Agboluaje brings back a ghostly Oluwale to confront the Leeds police officer charged with investigating his murder.

Through an examination of the ‘real’ figure of David Oluwale and his ‘haunting’ in the text, I propose that Agboluaje’s play generates a palimpsestic ‘scene of witnessing’ - a performative topography, where the ‘actuality’ and ‘veracity’ of Oluwale’s life becomes layered and sedimented within the performance text itself. Drawing on a Derridean reading of the ‘lie’ and ‘perjury’ I consider how absence can be performed and called upon to bear witness to a life that is no longer lived. Finally, in a reframing of Hillis Miller’s examination of the ‘ethics of reading’ (1989) I develop some broader proposals around the ‘ethics of dramaturgy’, questioning what kinds of demands are placed upon the spectator of Agboluaje’s play, and how it raises important ethical questions about the re- presentation of the absent and unremembered.

Amanda Stuart Fisher is a reader in contemporary theatres and performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research interests are focussed on questions of ethics and witnessing in relationship to verbatim and theatre of testimony (particularly in relation to trauma narratives). She has published articles in journals such as Performance Research, TDR and Studies in Theatre and Performance. She has recently completed a chapter on the theatre making of Charlotte Delbo during her internment in Auschwitz.

Paul Johnson Bioethics, performance, and the failure of imagination

This paper explores the intersection of bioethics and theatre, and how performance fails to address applied ethical questions. Bioethics is the application of philosophy, and ethics in particular, to questions in biomedical and environmental areas. Theatre has often been used to explore bioethical issues

200 such as embryo selection, stem cell research, or the use of animals in medical research, with proponents arguing that live performance provides a means for audiences to be engaged in “informed debate”. Theatre has been promoted by bodies such as the Wellcome Trust and the Irish Council for Bioethics, with the latter, following the introduction of bioethics playwriting competition arguing that “Because of its ability to pose contemporary questions that confront humanity, bioethics is an area well suited to the realm of drama”. This paper will argue that the failure of bioethical theatre to engage with philosophy results in a surfeit of what John Arras refers to as “the bad, implicit theory that infects so much public discussion of bioethical matters.” The case of Herietta Lacks, the woman from whom the original cells for the HeLa human cell line were taken will be discussed. HeLa cells were the first ‘immortal’ cell line, the first human cell to be cloned, and have been widely used across biomedical research to such an extent that over 20 tons of the cells have been produced. The performance possibilities of HeLa will be discussed as providing alternative to the ‘informed debate’ model of bioethical performance.

Paul Johnson is Head of Drama and Musical Theatre at the University of Wolverhampton. He has published on a range of areas, including the relationships between performance and science, philosophy and heritage.

Working Groups Session 4 & Business Meeting Friday 5th September 2.00-3.30pm

Cormac Power The Spectator as Poacher: Revising Passive vs Active Spectatorship

Philosopher Peter Hallward points to an impasse in contemporary philosophy which arises from a disjunction between what he calls “critique” and “emancipation.” To summarise most crudely, whereas historically emancipation is prepared for by the critique of what is established (e.g. Marx), various unfoldings including the reduction of the liberal project to an ideological arm of capitalism (explored at great length by Zizek for instance), has raised questions about the relationship between the activity of critique and emancipatory practices. In translating Hallward’s notion of impasse into the context of performance, we can perhaps see the operation of this impasse between critique and emancipation most clearly in relation to current debates around participatory performance practices. In general one might say there is a risk of participatory practice re-inscribing 201 social hierarchizations which at some level dictate the context of the performative encounter. In this paper I would like to consider the possibilities offered by Michel de Certeau’s theory of reading in The Practice of Everyday Life as a way of addressing (though not necessarily resolving) this impasse for performance. Rather than offering an account of the reader in terms of critique, or as one who needs the tools of critique to achieve an emancipated position, de Certeau offers us the reader as “poacher,” moving across lands that belong to someone else, free to run against the logic of the text’s construction. I wish to draw upon the potential of de Certeau’s idea to offer us alternative ways of envisioning performance and spectatorship.

Cormac Power is a Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts at Northumbria University. He has written on a range of plays and theatrical practices in relation to themes such as presence and representation, performance and concepts of failure, notions of visibility and invisibility as well as philosophical concepts in relation to contemporary actor-training. He is currently working on a monograph, which situates the ancient philosophy of Stoicism as a contemporary philosophy for performance.

Rachel Cockburn The precarious producer and the failure of resistance

In this paper I address the subject of the ‘artist’ within the neoliberal sphere: how can the artist avoid being inscribed as an elite worker who is at ease within a plutocratic society - one who is articulated within the specific neoliberal hegemonic formation, or as Jen Harvie terms the ‘artrepreneur’ (Harvie 2013:63), a worker at ‘the heart of the creative economy’.

In response to this question, I argue that if the artist is to resist such an articulation it is only within the context of precarity (Laclau & Mouffe 1989); an aesthetics of precarity that locates resistance at the articulatory struggle of the constitution of the self as a neoliberal subject (Foucault 1983). This is a struggle that engages with failure, incompleteness, and contingency - specifically one that questions the reconciliation offered by a supposedly autonomous form of aesthetic labour. An aesthetic practice of precarity, I argue, is a break from the modernist dream of an aesthetics functioning through the conjunction of autonomy and heteronomy, and a resistance to the ‘artrepreneur’. By reflecting on the practices of Francis Alys, Vivian Maier, and William Lyttle (aka. ‘Moleman’ of Hackney), I articulate how an aesthetics of precarity might be understood, the precarious producer within it, and the form of resistance that they might offer.

Rachel Cockburn is interested in engagements with failure, risk, comedy and philosophy

202 in various sites and relational situations; with a particular focus on the intersection between performance, philosophy and political agency. Current research examines the modality of modern forms of bio-governance and modern aesthetics failure to resist.

Lizeta Makka Praxis and creativity: The project of autonomy and the collective event

The present paper raises the question of the relationship between art and politics. For Allain Badiou the situation of politics is also the situation of art, given that both include the state of political action. Cornelius Castoriadis proposes the project of autonomy as a radical response to the failure of the existing system, based on the creative dimension of praxis. In order to achieve its autonomy, the subject, must return to the primary state, just before the praxis. In other words, the social must regain its imaginary state.

In the present paper I will argue that art through collective action can propose new structures of the social, or as Badiou would call it a ‘new universality’. The occupation of Embros theatre in Athens, which functions as a self-managed space, will be a paradigm to this argument through which the attempt to raise the connection between art and politics will unfold.

The main question is whether the function of artistic creation is to suggest to the humanity a new kind of universality or simply to express itself or the community. My analysis will point toward the idea that artistic creation is the embodiment, the happening of an idea and therefore the new universality that art can suggest is the creation of a new form of happening of the idea. And this is how the case of Embros will be analysed, as an attempt through which a new mode of collective practice emerges, examining the nature of the event as such.

Lizeta Makka is an artist and PhD candidate at the department of Theatre and Performance at Brunel University. She received her Bachelor in Fine Arts from the University of Ioannina, Greece in 2007 and a Masters in Visual Arts from UAL in 2011. She has been exhibiting her work since 2006 in numerous shows in Greece and in the United Kingdom. Her research examines the current social and institutional crisis mainly in Greece. One strand of the research focuses on collective artistic practices and the occupation of public spaces as political praxis. A second strand focuses on political philosophy and the concept of social autonomy examining the role of art as praxis that serves the common good.

203 Working Group Conveners

Applied & Social Sylvan Baker Alison Jeffers Theatre Kat Low Dave Calvert

Theatre History and Catherine Hindson Historiography Patricia Smyth

20th-21st Century Thomaidis Konstantinos Performer Training Libby Worth Mark Evans Performance, Gareth White Identity and Rachel Clements Community Anna Harpin

Theatre, Eve Katsouraki Performance and Philosophy

Popular Adam Ainsworth Performance

Performance and Martin Blain New Technologies Maria Chatzichristodoulou

Performance James Freize and the Body

Directing and David Barnett Dramaturgy Sarah Grochala

Documenting Laura Molloy Performance Toni Sant

Scenography Fred Meller Siobhan O’Gorman 204 Nick Hunt

Worth Building Worth adjoins the Katharineadjoins Caryl Churchill Theatre Studio 1 Studio 2 Green Room Green Ground FloorGround Seminar Room Rehearsal Room B (RRB) Rehearsal Room First Floor (new building) Rehearsal Room A (RRA) Rehearsal Room Katharine Worth Building Katharine Worth

hill) the hill) MX034 Basement First floor PCIN 005 Moore Moore Annex Management Building: Building: Management IN243, IN244, IN245 IN244, IN243, International Building (first building on the (first building right as you exit the Boiler House up you (first building on the left(first building you as exit the Boiler House down the exit the Boiler House down Rooms and Locations 205 206 207 Designed by Sylwia Dobkowska